Profiles of second- to fourth-order moments of turbulent temperature fluctuations in the convective boundary layer: first measurements with rotational Raman lidar

Behrendt, A.; Wulfmeyer, V.; Hammann, E.; Muppa, S. K.; Pal, S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-5485-2015

Articles | Volume 15, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-5485-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

HD(CP)² Observational Prototype Experiment (AMT/ACP...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-5485-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 10

Research article

|

20 May 2015

Research article |

| 20 May 2015

Profiles of second- to fourth-order moments of turbulent temperature fluctuations in the convective boundary layer: first measurements with rotational Raman lidar

A. Behrendt, V. Wulfmeyer, E. Hammann, S. K. Muppa, and S. Pal

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Final revised paper (published on 20 May 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Nov 2014)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC C10273: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 17 Dec 2014
RC C10358: 'subject', Anonymous Referee #2, 19 Dec 2014
RC C10445: 'Review of Behrendt et al.: Profiles of Second- to Third-Order Moments of Turbulent Temperature Fluctuations in the Convective Boundary Layer: First Measurements with Rotational Raman Lidar', Anonymous Referee #3, 24 Dec 2014
AC C12534: 'Replies to all comments', Andreas Behrendt, 07 Mar 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Andreas Behrendt on behalf of the Authors (07 Mar 2015)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (19 Mar 2015) by Stefan Buehler

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (04 Apr 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors adressed carefully the points raised by me and the other reviewers.
Especially they reinvestigated and described in more detail the technique for the noise removal according to Lenschow et al. (2000). The re-calculation changed the results slightly (smaller integral scales in upper 20% of ML, larger variances in upper ML, smaller TOM at zi, etc.) but not significantly. Comparison to existing literature has been included.

There remain some minor points:

* section 3.1. Dataset
page 9 line 12 - accuracary of the Graw radiosonde
one may also refer to the WMO report 107 which gives several (smaller) errors ...
http://library.wmo.int/opac/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=15531#.VRBWPuEhGPo%3C

* section 3.7. FOM and Kurtosis:
... Is based on equation 12 but i guess it has been also corrected for noise following Lenschow et al (2000) - please clarify.

* section 3.2. Turbulent temp. fluctuations
(page 12 line 1) It is stated that spectral analysis adds noise to the data - this is simply not correct: Autocavariance and Power spectrum can be reversibly transformed into each other by means of a fourier transform and its inverse. The difference is that uncorrelated noise appears in the acov largely (but not only) as a distinct peak at lag zero while in the powerspectrum it is a band of more or less constant power at high frequencies. I.e. the noise is distributed broadly, making the noise determination in the frequency domain more challenging.
=> The sentence should be adapted.

The power spectra provided in the reply indicate that at 1290m nearly all fluctuations in the data are due to noise.

* fig 5:
Although stated in the reply, the ranges of the colorscales where not changed.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (08 Apr 2015)

ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (08 Apr 2015) by Stefan Buehler

AR by Andreas Behrendt on behalf of the Authors (21 Apr 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (25 Apr 2015) by Stefan Buehler

AR by Andreas Behrendt on behalf of the Authors (25 Apr 2015)

Short summary

The exchange of energy between the Earth surface and the atmosphere is governed by turbulent processes which form the convective boundary layer (CBL) in daytime. The representation of the CBL in atmospheric models is critical, e.g., for the simulation of clouds and precipitation. We show that a new active remote-sensing technique, rotational Raman lidar, characterizes the turbulent temperature fluctuations in the CBL better than previous techniques and discuss the statistics of a typical case.