Estimation and characterization of atmospheric turbulence in the free atmosphere above the Tibetan Plateau using the Thorpe method

Abstract

Understanding turbulence in the free atmosphere is important for analyzing atmospheric pollution, forecasting weather, and light transmission. In this paper, we have tried to estimate the atmospheric refractive index structure constant C n 2 , the turbulent dissipation rate ε , and the turbulent diffusion coefficient K simultaneously during the experiment time over Lhasa, using the sounding data coupled with the Thorpe method. The result shows that the C n 2 estimation gives a better performance with the correlation coefficients and the average relative error when compared with C n 2 estimated by Dewan and HMNSP99. Besides this, the measured and estimated C n 2 , estimated ε , and K all show larger values in the troposphere, especially near the tropopause. It is worth noting that C n 2 and ε are similar in terms of height distribution. These attempts at estimation all suggest that the Thorpe method can be used to estimate the intensity of turbulence in the free atmosphere over Lhasa.