Two Experiments on Using a Scintillometer to Infer the Surface Fluxes of Momentum and Sensible Heat

Abstract

AbstractA traditional use of scintillometry is to infer path-averaged values of the turbulent surface fluxes of sensible heat Hs and momentum τ (, where ρ is air density and u* is the friction velocity). Many scintillometer setups, however, measure only the path-averaged refractive-index structure parameter ; the wind information necessary for inferring u* and Hs comes from point measurements or is absent. The Scintec AG SLS20 surface-layer scintillometer system, however, measures both and the inner scale of turbulence ℓ0, where ℓ0 is related to the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy ɛ. The SLS20 is thus presumed to provide path-averaged estimates of both u* and Hs. This paper describes comparisons between SLS20-derived estimates of u* and Hs and simultaneous eddy-covariance measurements of these quantities during two experiments: one, over Arctic sea ice; and a second, over a midlatitude land site during spring. For both experiments, the correlation between scintillometer and eddy-covariance fluxes is reasonable: correlation coefficients are typically above 0.7 for the better-quality data. For both experiments, though, the scintillometer usually underestimates u* and underestimates the magnitude of Hs when compared with the corresponding eddy-covariance values. The data also tend to be more scattered when < 10−14 m−2/3: the signal-to-noise ratio for scintillometer-derived fluxes decreases as decreases. An essential question that arises during these comparisons is what similarity functions to use for inferring fluxes from the scintillometer and ℓ0 measurements. The paper thus closes by evaluating whether any of four candidate sets of similarity functions is consistent with the scintillometer data.