ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY

Whenever we travel by plane, we often experience that the flight becomes bumpy quite suddenly during the descent. This phenomenon causes not only discomfort to the passengers, but also a few headaches to climate scientists, whose models depend critically on properties associated with this phenomenon.

The sudden agitation indicates that we are abandoning the relatively calm free troposphere and we are entering into the planetary boundary layer, filled with turbulent motions (see Fig. 1). Within this transition region, air from the free troposphere above is mixed into the planetary boundary layer, and the local thermodynamic conditions change accordingly. Cloud processes, like the cooling caused by radiation or by the evaporation of droplets, may amplify the relevance of this local mixing to the extent that small-scale turbulence becomes one of the dominant mechanisms in the evolution of the planetary boundary layer and the clouds themselves (see Fig. 2).

Advances in super-computing allows nowadays to simulate directly – without intermediate turbulence models – the details of the turbulent motions inside of the planetary boundary layer. We can cover a range of scales of several orders of magnitude, from the large, organized ascending thermals to the small, apparently random vortices. Also, computers allow us to solve accurately idealized problems in which we can switch on and off different cloud processes selectively, like evaporative and radiative cooling, learning thereby how important these processes really are (see Fig.3).

As an example of the new findings that this line of research is providing, we have learned that the transition region at the top of the planetary boundary layer, about 100 meters high, comprises in reality two different sub-layers. The upper sub-layer, characterized by the crests or domes observed in Fig. 1 at the top of the turbulent region, is where the troposphere opposes the advance of turbulence most strongly. This region is characterized by local properties different from those describing the rest of the planetary boundary layer. The lower sub-layer acts as a transition towards the underlying well-mixed central region of the planetary boundary layer.

An extension of this analysis considers the effect of surface heterogeneity, like the alternation of ice-covered and ice-free regions in the ocean, which modifies the general structure of the planetary boundary layer and the way it grows into the troposphere. Another line of research of this project investigates the turbulence intermittency and collapse that appears, for instance, in the nocturnal boundary layer or in arctic regions, as the surface cools down with respect to the troposphere.