A study of vertical velocity distributions in the planetary boundary layer

Until recently, pollution dispersion models have made predictions on the basis that the pollutant concentration is Gaussian. Such is not the case for convective conditions where the observed vertical velocity distribution is skewed towards the updraught portion of the distribution. One recent dispersion model assumes that the observed distribution can be synthesized by superimposing two Gaussians of appropriate means, variances and amplitudes.In the current paper, two techniques for deriving the constituent distributions are investigated. The first technique is based on conditionally sampling the vertical velocity time series and partitioning the vertical velocity samples into two sets — one set recorded when the sensor was experiencing an updraught and the other when the sensor was experiencing a downdraught. The second method consists of fitting two Gaussian distributions to the observed data and adjusting these using an iterative procedure until a specified tolerance is achieved.Both techniques give similar results which compare favourably with results obtained by other researchers. Assumptions, as well as advantages and disadvantages of each technique are also discussed.