The control of coherent eddies in vegetation canopies: streamwise structure spacing, canopy shear scale and atmospheric stability

International audience

anglais. An analogy has been established between a plane mixing layer and the atmospheric flow near the top of a vegetation canopy. It is based on a common feature, a strong inflection in the mean velocity profile, responsible for hydrodynamical instabilities that set the pattern for the coherent eddies and determine the turbulence length scales. In an earlier study, this analogy was tested using a small data set from thirteen experiments, all in near-neutral conditions. It provided a good prediction of the streamwise spacing Λw of the dominant canopy eddies (evaluated from time series of vertical velocity) that appears to depend on a shear length scale Ls = U(h)/U'(h), where h is canopy height, U is mean velocity and U' the vertical gradient dU/dz. The present analysis utilizes an extensive data set of approximately 700 thirty-minute runs, from six experiments on two forest sites and a maize crop, with a large range of stability conditions. Λw was estimated for each run using the wavelet transform as an objective, automated detection method. First, the variations of Λw and Ls with atmospheric stability are discussed. Neutral and unstable values exhibit a large scatter whereas in stable conditions both variables decrease with increasing stability. It is subsequently found that Λw is directly related to Ls, in a way close to the neutral prediction Λw /h = 8.1Ls/h.The Strouhal number Str = Ls /Λw is then shown to vary with atmospheric stability, weakly in unstable conditions, more significantly in stable conditions. Altogether these results suggest that, to some extent, the plane mixing-layer analogy can be extended to non-neutral conditions. It is argued that the primary effect of atmospheric stability, at least in stable conditions, is to modify the shear length scale Ls through changes in U(h) and U'(h), which in turn determines the streamwise spacing of the active, coherent motions.