A Detection of Convectively Induced Turbulence Using In Situ Aircraft and Radar Spectral Width Data

• Main Authors: Jung-Hoon Kim, Ja-Rin Park, Soo-Hyun Kim, Jeonghoe Kim, Eunjeong Lee, SeungWoo Baek, Gyuwon Lee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-02-01
• Series: Remote Sensing
• Subjects: convectively induced turbulence; eddy dissipation rate; in situ aircraft data; radar spectral width; numerical weather prediction
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/4/726

A commercial aircraft, departing from Seoul to Jeju Island in South Korea, encountered a convectively induced turbulence (CIT) at about z = 2.2 km near Seoul on 28 October 2018. At this time, the observed radar reflectivity showed that the convective band with cloud tops of z = 6–7 km passed the CIT region with high values of spectral width (SW; larger than 4 m s^–1). Using the 1 Hz wind data recorded by the aircraft, we estimated an objective intensity of the CIT as a cube root of eddy dissipation rate (EDR) based on the inertial range technique, which was about 0.33–0.37 m^2/3 s^-1. Radar-based EDR was also derived by lognormal mapping technique (LMT), showing that the EDR was about 0.3–0.35 m^2/3 s^-1 near the CIT location, which is consistent with in situ EDR. In addition, a feasibility of the CIT forecast was tested using the weather and research forecast (WRF) model with a 3 km horizontal grid spacing. The model accurately reproduced the convective band passing the CIT event with an hour delay, which allows the use of two methods to calculate EDR: The first is using both the sub-grid and resolved turbulent kinetic energy to infer the EDR; the second is using the LMT for converting absolute vertical velocity (and its combination with the Richardson number) to EDR-scale. As a result, we found that the model-based EDRs were about 0.3–0.4 m^2/3 s^-1 near the CIT event, which is consistent with the estimated EDRs from both aircraft and radar observations.