NASA NTRS1989
Techniques for extraction boundary layer parameters from measurements of a short-pulse CO2 Doppler lidar are described. The measurements are those collected during the First International Satellites Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) Field Experiment (FIFE). By continuously operating the lidar for about an hour, stable statistics of the radial velocities can be extracted. Assuming that the turbulence is horizontally homogeneous, the mean wind, its standard deviations, and the momentum fluxes were estimated. Spectral analysis of the radial velocities is also performed from which, by examining the amplitude of the power spectrum at the inertial range, the kinetic energy dissipation was deduced. Finally, using the statistical form of the Navier-Stokes equations, the surface heat flux is derived as the residual balance between the vertical gradient of the third moment of the vertical velocity and the kinetic energy dissipation. Combining many measurements would normally reduce the error provided that, it is unbiased and uncorrelated. The nature of some of the algorithms however, is such that, biased and correlated errors may be generated even though the raw measurements are not. Data processing procedures were developed that eliminate bias and minimize error correlation. Once bias and error correlations are accounted for, the large sample size is shown to reduce the errors substantially. The principal features of the derived turbulence statistics for two case studied are presented.