A New Concept for Representing Trees in LES Simulations

Atmosphere-biosphere interactions have become an important focus in Earth science. Key issues involving this type of interactions, such as dispersal of aerosols, seeds and pollen from forest canopies into the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), require a good understanding of turbulence in and near plant canopies. With modern computers, it is now feasible to use Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) at quite high resolution. Thus, we upgraded the LES version of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) so that it can simulate turbulence inside forest canopies (hereafter referred to as the "RAMS Forest LES" RAFLES) while accounting explicitly for some of the tree characteristics. The simulation domain consists of the tree canopy that is constructed using the Virtual Canopy Generator (V-CaGe) based on observed structural properties of the forest. This canopy can be heterogeneous in all three dimensions. It interacts with the flow field by (1) generating obstacles to the flow resulting from the woody component of the canopy, (2) exchanging heat and vapor with the atmosphere, and (3) dragging the flow with the tree leaves. The "shaved" grid-cell technique is used to represent the obstacle field. RAFLES inherits from RAMS all its other characteristics (including its physics, grid-nesting structure, boundary conditions, data assimilation, and parallel computing, among others). Thus, it simulates atmospheric processes at the mesoscale and resolves the full depth of the ABL, which does not need to be parameterized as in other typical LES. RAFLES was evaluated with the high-frequency observations collected at the Duke Forest FACE site and it is used to study the impacts of various heterogeneous canopies on turbulence, seeds and pollen dispersal.