Rd. Crago, MIXED-LAYER CONVECTIVE TURBULENCE THEORY WITH FIRST INTERNATIONAL SATELLITE-LAND SURFACE CLIMATOLOGY PROJECT FIELD EXPERIMENT DATA, Water resources research, 32(9), 1996, pp. 2767-2774
The convective turbulence theory (CTT) [Stull, 1994] has several advan
tages over traditional bulk atmospheric boundary layer similarity form
ulations for the surface momentum and sensible heat fluxes under free
convection. In particular, in CTT surface fluxes at scales of 10(1)-10
(2) km are parameterized directly from surface and mixed layer measure
ments, without regard to the surface layer profiles or surface roughne
ss. The equations of CTT are tested with the First International Satel
lite-Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) Field Experiment (FIFE)
data set; the theory is extended so that geostrophic winds may be use
d in place of mixed layer winds; the formulation is applied to satelli
te-derived surface temperature data; and Stull's [1994] mixed convecti
on interpolation formula is tested. The scatter on graphs of the mixed
layer transfer coefficients for momentum and sensible heat is greater
for the FIFE data than for the Boundary-Layer Experiment 1983 (BLX83)
data used by Stull [1994], and the mean coefficient values are greate
r, probably because of the use of radiosonde data at FIFE and spatiall
y averaged aircraft data at BLX83. Surface momentum and sensible heat
flux estimated on the basis of CTT produced reasonable results but pro
vided little or no improvement over a direct correlation between the r
eference fluxes and the mixed layer wind speed or the surface-to-mixed
layer temperature difference. The geostrophic version of CTT provided
results comparable to the original CTT. Remotely sensed surface tempe
ratures used with geostrophic CTT allowed reasonable estimates of the
surface sensible heat flux.