Representative roughness parameters for homogeneous terrain

Abstract

Objective requirements are drawn up for experimental determination of the roughness of homogeneous terrain, particularly with respect to matching of the observation array to a terrain situation with given fetch, blending height and displacement length. Some fifty well-documented published experiments over various surfaces, ranging from mobile surfaces (sea, or moving sand or snow) to forests and towns, are shown to meet these criteria and are compiled. It is shown that most presently popular terrain reviews underestimate actual terrain roughness lengths by about a factor two. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.