On the correlation between turbulent velocity and temperature derivatives in the atmospheric surface layer

Velocity and temperature derivatives were obtained at a height of 4 m in the atmospheric surface layer above land. With the assumption of local isotropy, these measurements are used to obtain some statistics of the turbulent energy and scalar dissipation fields. These statistics include the variances of the logarithms of the scalar and velocity dissipation fields and the correlation between these logarithms. When used in conjunction with the hypotheses for fluctuations in turbulent dissipation rates of Obukhov and Kolmogorov, the statistics suggest that the dependence of the flatness factor of temperature derivative on the turbulent Rynolds number R is not as large as that which had been previously reported in the literature. The experimental data indicate a R ^0.5 dependence for the kurtosis of the temperature derivative and a R ^0.15 variation for the strain rate-scalar dissipation correlation.