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The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is a highly turbulent geophysical flow, which has chaotic and often too complex dynamics to unravel from limited data. Characterizing coherent turbulence structures in complex ABL flows under various atmospheric regimes is not systematically well established yet. This study aims to bridge this gap using large eddy simulations (LESs), Koopman theory, and unsupervised classification techniques. To this end, eight LESs of different convective, neutral, and unsteady ABLs are conducted. As the ratio of buoyancy to shear production increases, the turbulence structures change from roll vortices to convective cells. The quadrant analysis indicated that as this ratio increases, the sweep and ejection events decrease, and inward/outward interactions increase. The Koopman mode decomposition (KMD) is then used to characterize their turbulence structures. Our results showed that KMD can reveal non-trivial modes of highly turbulent ABL flows (e.g., transverse to the mean flow direction) and can reconstruct the primary dynamics of ABLs even under unsteady conditions with only ∼5% of the modes. We attributed the detected modes to the imposed pressure gradient (shear), Coriolis (inertial oscillations), and buoyancy (convection) forces by conducting novel timescale and quadrant analyses. We then applied the convolutional neural network combined with the K-means clustering to group the Koopman modes. This approach is displacement and rotation invariant, which allows efficiently reducing the number of modes that describe the overall ABL dynamics. Our results provide new insights into the dynamics of ABLs and present a systematic data-driven method to characterize their complex spatiotemporal patterns. 

Turbulence is a major source of momentum, heat, moisture, and aerosol transport in the atmosphere. Hence, it is crucial to understand and accurately characterize turbulence mechanisms in atmospheric flows. Many complex factors in the atmosphere influence the turbulence structures including stratification and background shear. However, our understanding of the interacting effects of these factors on coherent turbulence structure evolutions is still limited. In this talk, we aim to bridge this knowledge gap by using mode decomposition techniques and a wide range of large-eddy simulation (LES) data. By developing a data-driven technique, we will characterize unique features of atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) turbulence under different forcing scenarios. We will present 3D LES wind speed snapshots of different ABL flows that will be used as dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) input data. Then, the obtained modes and eigenvalues will be employed to gain insights into coherent turbulence structures in ABLs. We will explain the physical meaning of dominant modes and how each mode relates to the physical cause of turbulence structures. The dominant modes, which are selected based on the mode amplitude, contain the most important spatial and temporal characteristics of the flow. We will evaluate the accuracy of the performance of this method by reconstructing the flow field with only a small number of modes, and then calculate the mean average error between the real flow and the reconstructed flow fields. We will present different data frequencies, wind speeds, and surface heat fluxes. This allows us to elucidate the modes and determine the conditions in which the mode decomposition provides more accurate results for the ABL flows. Our findings can be used to identify the major causes of turbulence in real atmospheric flows and could provide a deeper insight into the dynamics of turbulence in ABLs. Our results will also be useful for developing reduced-order models that can rapidly predict the turbulent ABL flow fields.