P 6 . 18 INTERACTION BETWEEN WIND AND TEMPERATURE FIELDS UNDER THE HETEROGENEOUS HEAT FLUX IN THE PLANETARY BOUNDARY LAYER

The planetary boundary layer (PBL) is usually affected by the heterogeneous features at the surface such as the surface heat flux and the bottom topography. This can modify the characteristics of turbulent eddies significantly, which determines the vertical transfer of heat and momentum in the PBL. The previous studies using large eddy simulation (LES) suggested that the effects of heterogeneous surface heat flux are the most significant when its length scale is comparable to the PBL height (Shen and Leclerc, 1995; Raasch and Harbusch, 2001). It was also found that its effects disappear when the velocity of the background geostrophic wind becomes larger than 5.0 m s (Avissar and Schmidt, 1998). However, the previous studies were concerned with only how the background wind affects the temperature field of the PBL. Nonetheless the wind field is also expected to be modified by the heterogeneity of the surface heat flux as well. This suggests that we must understand the modifications of both wind and temperature fields simultaneously while considering their mutual interaction. Moreover, Shen and Leclerc (1995) and Raasch and Harbush (2001) suggested that the interaction might be different, depending on the relative directions of wind and of the surface heat flux variation. Here we attempted to examine how the heterogeneous heat flux at the surface affects the wind fields as well as how the wind field modifies potential temperature fields from the heterogeneous heat flux, and how they interact each other, using LES data. For this purpose, we considered two different relative directions between surface heat flux variation and the background geostrophic wind; the one that is parallel to and the other that is perpendicular each other.