Formation mechanism of dust devil-like vortices in a large eddy simulation

Dust devils are small-scale vertical vortices that often occur over deserts in fine weather conditions in which a convective mixed layer develops. Why such strong vortices are generated remains an issue in the dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer, and several hypotheses for the origin of strong vertical vorticity in dust devils have been proposed. However, no quantitative study on the source of vertical vorticity of dust devils has been made. In this study, a large eddy simulation model with grid spacing of 5m is used to simulate dust devil-like vortices (DDVs) embedded in a convective mixed layer and a quantitative analysis on their source of its vertical vorticity is made. In order to investigate the origin of vertical vorticity in the simulated DDV, the circulation, which is a conserved quantity in the absence of turbulent transport and baroclinic production of horizontal vorticity, is examined, where the circulation is calculated as a surface integral of vorticity vector on a material surface. The deformation of the material surface as it flows into the DDV shows gives quantitative information about how stretching and tilting of vorticity contribute to the formation of the DDV. Material surface is initially placed horizontally in the core of the simulated DDV. It is divided into about 20000 triangular patches and vertices of the patches are tracked backward for 128 seconds. Our analysis shows that the material surface converges, while approximately conserving circulation, toward the DDV from a wide horizontal plane. A standard deviation of circulations over horizontal circles of several hundred meters in radius near the surface shows that presence of circulations is an inherent property of the convective mixed layer and its magnitude is reasonably scaled by the product of the depth of convective mixed layer and the convective velocity. As a result of horizontal convergence of the circulation, strength of formed DDVs can be scaled with the convective velocity. However, it also strongly depends on resolution of the large eddy simulation: sizes of DDVs have not converged in the present simulation. To clarify dynamics that determine sizes of DDVs, we start a challenge with large eddy simulation with finer resolution. Three-dimensional image of the material surface tracked thorough 75 s. The height of each position is shown by the color shading.