Extracting turbulence parameters from second-by-second wind speed projections of dual-Doppler sector scans

The study of wind gusts and turbulence has been of interest to researchers and the engineering community for decades. For instance, wind plays a crucial role in the development of severe weather systems and wind turbine operation. The introduction of mobile radars has allowed for greater versatility in measuring weather phenomena. Specifically, knowledge of wind flows has benefited greatly from mobile radar deployments. However, extracting high-resolution temporal data from spatial wind data remained challenging. Particularly, this process is complicated due to the advection of wind gusts and turbulence through the radar scan volume during the elapsed time between elevation scans. Traditionally, Taylor’s hypothesis has been used to account for wind field advection in scanning volumes. However, Taylor’s hypothesis only applies the mean wind speed and direction for each constant-height-plane and does not account for small-scale variations of the flow. Thus, there is benefit in a method that accounts for intervolume flow variation and advection. Because advection properties can differ between atmospheric stability regimes, knowledge of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is critical. This study will utilize the Texas Tech University Ka (TTUKa) band mobile radars to measure various wind fields. Advection speed and direction will be generated between successive radar scans and were used to project the wind speed for every point in a sub-domain of the dual-doppler (DD) field for every second elapsed between radar scans. The results revealed a more comprehensive understanding of the structural evolution of a wind gust, which can have significant implications in the wind engineering field and numerical weather forecasting community.