Title
Fog Formation Related to Gravity Currents Interacting with Coastal Topography
Date Issued
01 December 2021
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Bardoel S.L.
Grachev A.A.
Krishnamurthy R.
Chamorro L.P.
Fernando H.J.S.
Publisher(s)
Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
Abstract
An interesting mixing-fog event was identified during the C-FOG field campaign, where a cold-frontal airmass arriving from the north-east collided with The Downs peninsula in Ferryland, Newfoundland, Canada, to produce misty/foggy conditions. A comprehensive set of field observations suggests that this collision caused turbulent mixing of nearly saturated ambient air with an almost saturated cold-frontal airmass, creating conditions for mixing fog. To delve into the physical processes underlying this phenomenon, laboratory experiments were performed on the interaction of lock-exchange-induced gravity currents with a rectangular obstacle. Instantaneous velocity and density fields were obtained using particle image velocimetry and planar laser-induced fluorescence. The observations suggest that the obstacle starts affecting the approaching gravity-current propagation at an upstream distance of 2H and, upon collision, the mixing occurs over a length of 0.83H, where H is the depth of the ambient fluid layer. The time for larger-scale turbulent stirring to permeate to the smallest scales of turbulence and activate the condensation nuclei is estimated as 3 t∗, where t∗=H/g′ is the intrinsic time scale of the gravity current, and g′ is the reduced gravity. Extrapolation of laboratory results to field conditions shows a good agreement with observations.
Start page
499
End page
521
Volume
181
Issue
March 2
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Investigación climática
Meteorología y ciencias atmosféricas
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85110340609
Source
Boundary-Layer Meteorology
ISSN of the container
00068314
Sponsor(s)
This research was funded by the Office of Naval Research Award #N00014-18-1-2472 entitled: Toward Improving Coastal Fog Prediction (C-FOG). The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated by Battelle Memorial Institute for the DOE under Contract DE-AC05-76 RL01830. We would like to thank Scott Coppersmith and Joo Sung Kim for their help with the laboratory experiments. The microphysical data were obtained from the Naval Postgraduate School group led by Professor Qing Wang, with Dr. Denny Allapattu and Mr. Ryan Yamaguchi making contributions. We also thank Dr. Ismail Gultepe, Sandeep Wagh, and Mr. Sen Wang for their help in numerous ways.
U.S. Department of Energy DE-AC05-76 RL01830 USDOE
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus