Entrainment and budgets of heat, water vapor, and carbon dioxide in a convective boundary layer driven by time-varying forcing

Abstract

A large-eddy simulation (LES) code is coupled with a land surface model to investigate the diurnal variation of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). The diurnal evolution of the ABL is driven by a time-varying incoming solar radiation. The results show that the domain average surface fluxes of sensible heat, water vapor, and carbon dioxide are smooth functions of time but the fluxes at any given surface grid point show random variations, especially the sensible heat flux. At the ABL top, the LES-resolved entrainment fluxes of these scalars also evolve with time and are not fixed fractions of their respective surface fluxes. Entrainment efficiency (the ratio of entrainment flux at z i to w e δφ, where z i is the ABL height, w e is entrainment velocity, and δφ is the jump of scalar across the entrainment zone) is highest for CO 2 and lowest for sensible heat. The first-order jump condition model is very good approximation to simulated entrainment fluxes which are largely controlled by the vertical gradients of the scalars across the capping inversion. Our results suggest that over the range of geostrophic winds considered (0-5 m s -1), neither the surface nor the entrainment flux reveals sensitivity to the geostrophic wind speed variations. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union.