Narrow Results

During a whole-day period, profiles of mean wind speed, wind shear and turbulence level shows great variability due to continuously varying atmospheric stability. Clearly understanding the spatial and temporal behaviors of the atmospheric wind flow is of great importance for science purposes. Large-eddy simulation (LES) technique is employed here to reproduce the evolution of atmospheric flow during a diurnal cycle. With the obtained LES results, wind characteristics in terms of wind speed, wind shear, turbulence intensity and turbulent kinetic energy can be examined referring to the stability classification. Besides, wind profiles obtained using currently available engineering models are also included for comparison. Disparities between the model predictions and the LES results illustrate that the standard engineering models cannot well capture the wind characteristics driven by the varying atmospheric stability solely, and a further improvement in models is highly needed.