High-resolution distributed temperature sensing: a new tool to study the space-time dynamics of transient cold-air pools in the weak-wind stable boundary layer

We present a novel approach to observing the two-dimensional thermal structure of atmospheric near-surface turbulent and non-turbulent flows by measuring air temperatures in a vertical plane at a high resolution (0.25 m, every approximately 2 s) using distributed temperature sensing (DTS). Air temperature observations obtained from a fiber optics array of approximate dimensions 8 by 8 m and sonic anemometer data from two levels were collected for a period of 23 days over a short grass field located in the flat bottom of a wide valley with moderate surface heterogeneity. In addition to evaluating the DTS technique to resolve the rapidly changing gradients and small-scale perturbations associated with turbulence in the atmosphere for convective and stable boundary layers, the objective was to analyze the space-time dynamics of transient cold-air pools in the stable boundary layer. The time response and precision of the fiber temperatures were adequate to resolve individual sub-meter sized turbulent and non-turbulent structures of time scales >= 3 s and enabled calculation of meaningful sensible heat fluxes when combined with vertical wind observations. The small turbulence scales associated with strong vertical shear and low measurement heights pose limitations to the technique. The top of the transient cold-air pool was highly non-stationary. The thermal structure of the near-surface air is generally a superposition of various perturbations of different time and length scales, whereas no preferred scales were identified. Vertical length scales for turbulence in the strongly stratified transient cold-air pool directly derived from the DTS data agreed well with buoyancy length scales parameterized using the vertical velocity variance and the Brunt-Vaisala frequency, while scales for weak stratification disagreed. The high-resolution DTS technique opens a new window into spatially sampling geophysical fluid flows including turbulent energy exchange with a broad potential in environmental sciences including meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, and ecology.