Deployment of Doppler lidar within forests: Advancing our understanding of canopy-atmospheric boundary layer processes

The atmospheric boundary layer above forest canopies is difficult to measure in practice, and our understanding of its flow physics usually is still limited to tall tower measurements which have limited reach above the canopy, or vertically-profiling remote sensing measurements which are usually taken outside of the canopy. We present a recent 5-month study of wind flow measurements taken above a 50-m tall forest in Washington state, USA, using two Doppler lidars. One vertical-profiling lidar was placed directly on top of the 70-m tall Wind River National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) tower and took measurements of wind velocity, direction and turbulence up to 220 m above ground level. A scanning lidar was placed in a nearby clearing and programmed to scan the wind field over the forest canopy, including overlapping its scans with the profiling lidar on top of the tower. The scanning lidar also captured terrain induced flows across the surrounding mountain-valley terrain. Both lidars captured wind jets and periods of intermittent turbulence over the forest canopy. How and when these mechanically-forced turbulence events penetrate the high leaf area index (LAI) forest canopy are studied using NEON’s eddy covariance flux exchange measurements and the tower profile measurements of air temperature, pressure, moisture, and wind velocity within the forest.

 

Applications of studying wind flow over the forest canopy are broad and vary from a better characterization of the wind profile for wind energy resource assessment to improving our understanding of vertical exchange processes by studying how “top-down” forced turbulence events influence mass and energy fluxes between the forest canopy and atmosphere. Special consideration of how above canopy processes influence canopy coupling/decoupling, including top-down turbulent sweep events, will be presented for the tall Wind River forest. We will also discuss upcoming experiments including 1) the deployment of 3-d sonic anemometers in the Wind River subcanopy (as part of a larger Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) below-canopy study) to advance our understanding of canopy mixing processes and 2) a new campaign planned for the deciduous Mountain Lake Biological Station NEON tower in the mountains of Virginia, USA. The latter study is designed to observe changes in the above-canopy wind profile and its interactions with below-canopy flows and vertical flux exchanges across a summer-to-winter LAI transition.