Estimating intermittency exponent in neutrally stratified atmospheric surface layer flows: A robust framework based on magnitude cumulant and surrogate analyses

This study proposes a novel framework based on magnitude cumulant and surrogate analyses to reliably detect the presence of intermittency and estimate the intermittency coefficient from short-length coarse-resolution turbulent time series. Intermittency coefficients estimated from a large number of neutrally stratified atmospheric surface layer turbulent series from various field campaigns are shown to remarkably concur with well-known laboratory experimental results. In addition, surrogate-based hypothesis testing significantly reduces the likelihood of detecting a spurious nonzero intermittency coefficient from nonintermittent series. The discriminatory power of the proposed framework is promising for addressing the unresolved question of how atmospheric stability affects the intermittency properties of boundary layer turbulence. © 2007 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.2786001