Turbulent Energy Budget Analysis Based on Coherent Wind Lidar Observations

Abstract. The turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budget term, as a key physical quantity for describing the generation and dissipation processes of turbulence, is crucial for revealing the essence and characteristics of turbulence. Due to limitations in current observational methods, the generation and dissipation mechanisms of atmospheric turbulent energy are mainly based on ground or tower-based observations, and studies on the budget terms of TKE of vertical structures are lacking. We propose a new method for detecting TKE budget terms based on coherent wind lidar, and compare it with data obtained with a three-dimensional ultrasonic anemometer. The results show that the lidar errors are relatively small, less than 0.0001 m²/s³, for at least 47 % of the data, which verifies the accuracy and reliability of our method. We explore the generation and dissipation mechanisms of turbulence under different weather conditions, and find that the buoyancy generation term plays a role in dissipating TKE under low cloud and light rain conditions. During the day, turbulent transport and the dissipation rate are the main dissipation terms, while buoyancy generation is the main dissipation term at night. The results show that the proposed method can accurately capture the vertical distribution of TKE, dissipation rate, shear generation, turbulent transport, and buoyancy generation terms in the boundary layer, and can comprehensively reflect the influence of each budget term on the vertical structure of turbulent energy. This research provides a new perspective and method for studies of atmospheric turbulence, which can be further applied to fine observations of the vertical structure and dynamics of turbulence.