Abstract
Heterogeneous surface conditions modify the flow structure of the convective boundary layer (CBL). We investigated this impact focusing on the spatial representativeness of eddy-covariance (EC) point observations. The typical daytime boundary layer was simulated using large eddy simulation (LES), where horizontal heterogeneity was imposed on the ground surface heating as one-dimensional sinusoidal variation. The effect of variation of the wavelength and amplitude on the vertical heat transport was examined.
The surface budged based on the point EC method is examined excluding the net vertical heat transport due to the mesoscale circulations invoked by surface heterogeneity. The mesoscale circulation is represented using a phase average. The result found that our simulated EC point measurements still underestimate this energy budget. However, this deficit gets close to zero when the surface heterogeneity is strong. This underestimate can be strongly attributed to the turbulent organized structure (TOS) developed parallel to the mesoscale circulation.
