On the scaling law of ramp structures in scalar turbulence

• Main Authors: Dong-Wei CHEN, Fei HU, Jing-Jing XU
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. 2018-07-01
• Series: Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters
• Subjects: Scalar turbulence; ramp structure; scaling law; self-similarity
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/16742834.2018.1473001

Ramp structures widely exist in scalar turbulence, such as temperature, water vapor, and carbon dioxide (CO2), which refer to the phenomenon that the physical quantity increases slowly with time and then suddenly drops. ramp structures lead to large gradients on a small scale and result in intermittency and anisotropy of turbulent flows. in this paper, wavelet analysis is used to analyze observed data from the beijing 325-m meteorological tower to extract ramp structures in temperature, water vapor, and CO2 signals. ramp structures in CO2 signals are different from those in temperature and water vapor in terms of the averaged temporal scale and normalized amplitude, and the ramp duration almost equals the cliff duration, which means ramp structures in CO2  signals are not easy to generate and different physical mechanisms may exist. in addition, both the ascending and descending part of ramp structures are linearly fitted. it is found that a scaling law exists between the slope and duration in the ascending part in the three scalar signals. the corresponding power exponents are slightly different. furthermore, the same rule exists in the descending part of ramp structures, which indicates that self-similarity may be a universal law in scalar turbulence. moreover, the maxima of selected ramp structures show the same pattern, i.e. there are ramp structures in the maximum sequence, which proves that small-scale ramp structures are superimposed on large-scale ramp structures.