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Abstract

Measurements of atmospheric turbulence made during the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean Experiment (SHEBA) are used to examine the profile stability functions of momentum, φ m , and sensible heat, φ h , in the stably stratified boundary layer over the Arctic pack ice. Turbulent fluxes and mean meteorological data that cover different surface conditions and a wide range of stability conditions were continuously measured and reported hourly at five levels on a 20-m main tower for 11 months. The comprehensive dataset collected during SHEBA allows studying φ m and φ h in detail and includes ample data for the very stable case. New parameterizations for φ m (ζ) and φ h (ζ) in stable conditions are proposed to describe the SHEBA data; these cover the entire range of the stability parameter ζ = z/L from neutral to very stable conditions, where L is the Obukhov length and z is the measurement height. In the limit of very strong stability, φ m follows a ζ 1/3 dependence, whereas φ h initially increases with increasing ζ, reaches a maximum at ζ ≈ 10, and then tends to level off with increasing ζ. The effects of self-correlation, which occur in plots of φ m and φ h versus ζ, are reduced by using an independent bin-averaging method instead of conventional averaging.

Keywords  Arctic Ocean - Flux–profile relationships - Monin–Obukhov similarity theory - SHEBA Experiment - Stable boundary layer

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