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The following animation results from the Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL) scanning horizontally just above treetop level in Dixon, CA, during the evening of 21 March 2007. The boundary layer during this time was weakly stable. The range-corrected backscatter intensity has been high-pass median filtered in the radial dimension to eliminate large scale radial trends in the data. To see the time-series of in situ data from this case, please see Fig. 3 of this paper.
The following movie shows the original range-corrected backscatter images on the left and high-pass median filtered images on the right. The movie runs from 00:46 UTC to 10:02 UTC on 21 Mar 2007 and is encoded to play at 30 frames per second in order to compress 1718 frames from over 9 hours of data into 1 minute. During the first couple of hours, backscatter perturbations are drawn out into long, wind-parallel, linear structures. Following this, and during the majority of the movie, the flow is highly variable and exhibits significant wave activity until weakly stable conditions. At around 9:13 UTC, a front sweeps across the region entering the scene from the NE and exiting to the SW resulting in a dramatic wind shift and filling the scene with many smaller scale perturbations.
These observations are discussed in greater detail in the following AMS Conference Paper:
Mayor, S. D., 2008: Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL) observations at the Canopy Horizontal Array Turbulence Study (CHATS). Oral presentations & paper 18A.6 in the American Meteorological Society’s 18th Symposium on Boundary Layers and Turbulence. 9-13 June 2008, Stockholm, Sweden.