Turbulence Interaction with Atmospheric Physical Processes

This article reviews the planetary-boundary-layer (PBL) turbulence and its interactions with atmospheric processes. We show three examples: turbulence response to surface heating and cooling over lands, effects of ocean waves, and interactions with radiation and cloud microphysics.We also show how computational fluid dynamics methods are used to gain fundamental understanding of these interactions mostly under idealized environments. For certain practical applications in which idealized conditions may not apply, a brute-force method may be needed to explicitly simulate the turbulence interaction. One way is to nest a large-eddy simulation domain inside a weather forecast model, and to allow for turbulence feedback to other physical processes. This numerical method sounds straightforward but poses two major problems. We suggest a systematic approach to examine the problems.