The influence of atmospheric stability on the ‘Leipzig’ boundary-layer structure

The Leipzig wind profile recorded in 1931 has long been considered representative of the wind profile expected in a steady, barotropic flow in the planetary boundary layer over a flat homogeneous surface. As such, the Leipzig data set has been extensively used in the development of computational models for planetary boundary-layer flows. To date, workers have assumed that the effect of stable stratification in the atmosphere over Leipzig was negligible. In the present work, a second-order turbulence closure that explicitly accounts for the effects of stable stratification is used to analyse the Leipzig data. The importance of stable stratification in this near-neutral data set is demonstrated.