Turbulence frontogenesis

Summary The frontogenesis function in terms of the time derivative of the gradient of any relevant airborne quantity comprises all processes contributing to frontogenesis. Thus the various terms of this function are able to reveal processes of frontal development and their structure. Therefore the evaluation of these terms from measurements or in the frame of model simulations offers the chance of gaining more insight in frontal processes. If frontogenesis is evaluated from average basic data representative for a certain time-or space-scale, the result will be a kind of average frontogenesis, which naturally contains turbulence terms in the form of covariances. The processes described by these terms are called turbulence frontogenesis.This paper describes the basic formalisms of turbulence frontogenesis, offers cross-sections of these terms gained in experiments flown in sea-breeze fronts and gives some hints about their general behaviour.With 4 Figures