Jd. Wilson et al., A FIRST-ORDER CLOSURE FOR DISTURBED PLANT-CANOPY FLOWS, AND ITS APPLICATION TO WINDS IN A CANOPY ON A RIDGE, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 124(547), 1998, pp. 705-732
To calculate disturbed wind flows in plant canopies, we studied a vari
ant of the K proportional to lambda k(1/2) first-order closure (where
K is the eddy viscosity, k is the turbulent kinetic energy calculated
from its simplified governing differential equation, and lambda is an
algebraic length-scale). We compare numerical solutions using this clo
sure (which admits only three empirical constants) with earlier observ
ations of mean wind, shear stress, and turbulent kinetic energy in thr
ee, quite different, uniform canopy flows, and in disturbed canopy flo
w over a ridge. The closure performs as well as or better than the sol
utions of others based on modifications of the 'k-epsilon' closure, wh
ere epsilon is the rate of dissipation of k.