The characteristics of turbulent moisture on Huaihe river basin in China

Summary ?A lot of work on near surface turbulence characteristics has been done in the experimental study of atmospheric turbulence, but little work on fluctuating scalar field has been done, especially on some quantities such as moisture and pollution. In this paper, with the methods of statistical theory, Fourier transform, fractal geometry and wavelet transform, the turbulent moisture data obtained from Huaihe River Basin Experiment (HUBEX) are studied to explore the statistical, spectral, fractal and intermittent characteristics of turbulent moisture. The results show that: (1) In the high humid area such as Huaihe river basin, the moisture plays an important role in the surface energy balance, energy transportation and cycle. (2) The energy spectra and cospectra are in agreement with the “−2/3” and “−4/3” scaling power law correspondingly in inertial sub-range. (3) The fractal dimension of turbulent moisture in Huaihe river basin is clearly higher than that in other areas (such as Beijing). (4) The fluctuating moisture field has strong intermittency, and is not in accordance with the Kolmogorov theory. With the orthonormal wavelet transform, the dissipative events of the fluctuating moisture field contributing to inertial sub-range intermittency buildup have been identified. After the dissipative events have been suppressed by introducing a conditioning wavelet sampling scheme, the intermittency that affects the statistical structure of inertial sub-range is restrained. However the repressive effects of intermittency on turbulent moisture field are worse than those on turbulent velocity field. The reason may be either the intermittency of turbulent moisture is strong or some coherence structures exist in the turbulent moisture field. Received April 27, 2001; Revised January 23, 2002