Estimating Turbulence Kinetic Energy Dissipation Rates in Atmospheric Flows: A Priori Study

In this work, Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of atmospheric convective boundary layer flow is used to test various approaches to estimate turbulence kinetic energy dissipation rate (EDR) ϵ from one-dimensional (1D) velocity signals. Results of these estimates are compared with “true” DNS values of ϵ . We focus on methods of EDR retrievals proposed recently in Wacławczyk et al. Atmos. Meas. Tech. 10, 2017. We test these methods and show that they provide a valuable complement to standard approaches. Another goal is to investigate how the presence of anisotropy due to buoyancy affect the various retrieval techniques of ϵ .