A commercial aircraft, departing from Seoul to Jeju Island in South Korea, encountered a convectively induced turbulence (CIT) at about z = 2.2 km near Seoul on 28 October 2018. At this time, the observed radar reflectivity showed that the convective band with cloud tops of z = 6–7 km passed the CIT region with high values of spectral width (SW; larger than 4 m s–1). Using the 1 Hz wind data recorded by the aircraft, we estimated an objective intensity of the CIT as a cube root of eddy dissipation rate (EDR) based on the inertial range technique, which was about 0.33–0.37 m2/3 s−1. Radar-based EDR was also derived by lognormal mapping technique (LMT), showing that the EDR was about 0.3–0.35 m2/3 s−1 near the CIT location, which is consistent with in situ EDR. In addition, a feasibility of the CIT forecast was tested using the weather and research forecast (WRF) model with a 3 km horizontal grid spacing. The model accurately reproduced the convective band passing the CIT event with an hour delay, which allows the use of two methods to calculate EDR: The first is using both the sub-grid and resolved turbulent kinetic energy to infer the EDR; the second is using the LMT for converting absolute vertical velocity (and its combination with the Richardson number) to EDR-scale. As a result, we found that the model-based EDRs were about 0.3–0.4 m2/3 s−1 near the CIT event, which is consistent with the estimated EDRs from both aircraft and radar observations.
The characteristics of low-level turbulence at Boseong, located on the southern coast of South Korea, were investigated in terms of eddy dissipation rate (EDR) using 1-year (2018) of wind data obtained from the Boseong Meteorological Observatory (BMO), a World Meteorological Organization testbed. At BMO, a 307 m tall tower is installed on which four high-frequency (20 Hz) sonic anemometers are mounted at 60, 140, and 300 m above ground level (AGL). In addition, a sonic anemometer at 2.5 m AGL is located to the south of the tower. EDRs are estimated from the wind measurements based on three different EDR estimation methods. The first two methods use the inertial dissipation method derived from Kolmogorov turbulence theory, and the third uses a maximum likelihood estimation assuming a von Kármán spectral model. Reasonable agreement was obtained between the three methods with various fluctuations, including diurnal variations for all seasons, while the EDR calculated from the third method displayed slightly higher EDR values than the other two methods. The result of the analysis showed that the mean (standard deviations) of logarithms of EDR had larger values as height decreased (increased), and the means were higher in the unstable planetary boundary layer (PBL) than in the stable PBL for this heterogeneous location adjacent to the coastlines. The probability density functions (PDFs) of the EDRs showed that the distribution was well-represented by a lognormal distribution in both the stable and unstable PBL, although the PDFs at the lowest level (2.5 m) deviated from those at other levels due to surface effects. Seasonal variations in the PDFs showed that there was less difference in the shape of the PDFs depending on atmospheric stability in the wintertime. Finally, we calculate the 1-yr statistics of the observed EDR, which will be used for future LLT forecast systems in Korea.