NYTEFOX - The NY-Ålesund TurbulencE Fiber Optic eXperiment investigating the Arctic boundary layer, Svalbard

Atmospheric processes in the weak-wind stable boundary layer are an open field of research since they are poorly represented by theoretical concepts including similarity theories commonly applied in the air layer adjacent to the surface. This lack of understanding affects polar regions the most sinc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huss, Jannis-Michael, Zeller, Marie-Louise, Pfister, Lena, Lapo, Karl E., Littmann, Daniela, Schneider, Johann, Schulz, Alexander, Thomas, Christoph K.
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://zenodo.org/record/4756836
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4756836
Description
Summary:Atmospheric processes in the weak-wind stable boundary layer are an open field of research since they are poorly represented by theoretical concepts including similarity theories commonly applied in the air layer adjacent to the surface. This lack of understanding affects polar regions the most since the observation density is sparse while the fraction of weak-wind conditions with strong static stability increases drastically during polar night which is characterized by a long-lived stable boundary layer. The atmospheric motions carrying the bulk of the near-surface transport in these conditions occur on scales larger than forced or free convective turbulence, show different characteristics and are known as submeso-scale motions. These submeso-scale motions cannot be resolved by common point measurements due to their quasi-stationary or transient behavior but require distributed observations such as from sensor networks or continuous observational techniques. A suite of observations satisfying these requirements were collected during the Ny-Ålesund TurbulencE Fiber Optic eXperiment, NYTEFOX, which was a field campaign conducted at an Arctic field site at the perimeter of the Ny-Ålesund science station (11.9°E, 78.9°N) in February and March 2020. It was the first field campaign in an Arctic environment to investigate the spatio-temporal variability of airflow and temperature across hundreds of meters horizontally by means of the innovative Fiber-Optic Distributed Sensing (FODS) technique. A 700 m long horizontal, trapezoidal transect of fiber-optic cables installed at 1.2 m above ground level (agl) yielded measurements of temperature and wind speed with a resolution of 0.127 m and 9 s, supplemented by three 7 m tall vertical profiles. A coil-wrapped column of fiber-optic cable, helically wound around a support fabric, added a high-resolution vertical temperature profile from below the snow surface (-0.25 m) up to 2.5 m agl with an effective vertical resolution of 0.0025 m to 0.02 m depending on height. The 14-day ...