Turbulence in thermally-driven slope winds

The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) in mountainous regions is characterised by a variety of airflows, originating from complex landform forcing, which encompass a range of scales of motion, from synoptic scale flows to very local phenomena, such as the daily-periodic thermally-driven circulations developing over inclines and in the valleys under clear sky and in the absence of major synoptic forcing. These airflows, and turbulence generated therein, affect a variety of processes, including surface-atmosphere exchanges of momentum, energy and mass, and transport across a variety of scales. They may also contribute to the initiation of orographic convection. 

The talk focuses on the simplest of these flows, namely slope winds, outlines the state of our present understanding, from measurements as well as from numerical model simulations, and highlights still open questions concerning the structure of turbulence properties and their representation in terms of similarity. Ongoing efforts to investigate these flows within the current initiative TEAMx - Multi-scale transport and exchange processes

in the atmosphere over mountains – programme and experiment (http://www.teamx-programme.org/)  are also presented.