Comparison of Wind profile models across the Ekman layer

Knowledge of the wind profile in the planetary boundary layer is key to many applications from wind power engineering via boundary-layer schemes in the atmosphere to PBL closure in large- and mesoscale models. In this presentation, we will present an account on existing, operational wind profile models against a novel representation of the wind vector across the Ekman layer. Our novel representation of the wind profiles is based on a consistent non-dimensionalization of the entire boundary layer down to the surface and thus takes into account rotational effects in vicinity to the bottom boundary. We compare our theory to both existing wind profile models and to data from direct numerical simulation up to Re_τ~4000.

*This work is part of the project "trainABL" funded by the European Commission throgh the European Research Council (ERC) under its Starting Grant Scheme (ERC-2019-StG Grant No. 851374)