REAL Observations of Canopy Waves
Mayor, S. D., 2017: Observations of microscale internal gravity waves in very stable atmospheric boundary layers over an orchard canopy. Agric. For. Meteorol. 244-245, 136-150. PDF Link
This page presents Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL) observations of canopy waves collected near Dixon, California, during the Canopy Horizontal Array Turbulance Study (CHATS) in the spring of 2007. The REAL observed fifty-three wave episodes during the three-month period of nearly continuous scanning. The nearly horizontal cross sectional lidar highpass filtered elastic backscatter intensity images and animations have been carefully examined for the presense of fine scale wave packets.
For a wave packet to be included in this study, it must have passed through the tower (located 1.6 km directly south of the lidar) and have a lifetime longer than one minute. Our subjective judgments of the coherence of the wave packets were based on the clear identification of crests and troughs and movement together as a group.
All cases occured during stably-stratified nighttime conditions. These cases occured on 29 of the 86 nights during CHATS. The internal waves have wavelengths ranging between 30 m and 100 m. The wave episode durations range from 1 min 43 sec to 1 hr 1 min 37 sec.
One journal article, several conference presentations, and one masters thesis have been published on the observations of these canopy waves:
Mayor, S. D., 2017: Observations of microscale internal gravity waves over an orchard canopy, Oral presentation at Propagation through and Characterization of Atmospheric and Oceanic Phenomena at the OSA Imaging and Applied Optics Congress, 26 - 29 June, San Francisco, CA. PDF Link
Mayor, S. D., 2017: Observations of microscale internal gravity waves in very stable atmospheric boundary layers over an orchard canopy. Agric. For. Meteorol. 244-245, 136-150. PDF Link
Randall, T., 2015: Observations of microscale gravity waves in the nocturnal boundary layer above an orchard canopy by a horizontally scanning lidar, Master of Science, Thesis, Environmental Science, California State University, Chico.
Randall, T. N. and S. D. Mayor, 2013: Observations of canopy waves above an orchard by a horizontally-scanning aerosol lidar. Presentation A43A-0213 in Atmospheric Boundary Layer Processes and Turbulence Posters, American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 8-13 December.
Randall, T. N. and S. D. Mayor, 2013: Lidar observations of fine-scale internal gravity waves. Poster presentation 715 in Sixth Symposium on Lidar Atmospheric Applications, 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, 9 January, Austin, TX.
Randall, T. N., E. R. Jachens, and S. D. Mayor, 2012: Lidar observations of fine-scale atmospheric gravity waves in the nocturnal boundary layer above an orchard canopy. Poster Presentation at the American Meteorological Society's 20th Symposium on Boundary Layers and Turbulence, 9-13 July 2012, Boston, MA.
Jachens, E. R. and S. D. Mayor, 2012: Lidar observations of fine-scale atmospheric gravity waves in the nocturnal boundary layer above an orchard canopy. Poster Presentation S8P-05 at the 26th International Laser Radar Conference, 25-29 June 2012 in Porto Heli, Greece.
Mayor, S. D., E. R. Jachens, and T. N. Randall, 2012: Lidar observations of fine-scale gravity waves in the nocturnal boundary layer above an orchard canopy. Poster Presentation P01-15 at the 16th International Symposium for the Advancement of Boundary-Layer Remote Sensing (ISARS), 5-8 June 2012, Boulder, Colorado.