Parabolic dependence of the drag coefficient on wind speed from aircraft eddy-covariance measurements over the tropical Eastern Pacific

Zhiqiu Gao; Wenwu Peng; Chloe Y Gao; Yubin Li

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-58699-9

Parabolic dependence of the drag coefficient on wind speed from aircraft eddy-covariance measurements over the tropical Eastern Pacific

Sci Rep. 2020 Feb 4;10(1):1805. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-58699-9.

Authors

Zhiqiu Gao^{1

2}, Wenwu Peng³, Chloe Y Gao⁴, Yubin Li^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters, School of Atmospheric physics, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China. zgao@nuist.edu.cn.
² State Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Physics and Atmospheric Chemistry, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China. zgao@nuist.edu.cn.
³ School of Applied Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China.
⁴ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States.
⁵ Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters, School of Atmospheric physics, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China. liyubin@nuist.edu.cn.
⁶ Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai, 519082, China. liyubin@nuist.edu.cn.

Abstract

In this study, we examine and present the relationship between drag coefficient and wind speed. We used an observational dataset that consists of 806 estimates of the mean flow and fluxes from aircraft eddy-covariance measurements over the tropical Eastern Pacific. To estimate the saturated wind speed threshold, we regressed the drag coefficients for wind speed scope from 10 ms^-1 to 28 ms^-1. Results show that the relationship between drag coefficient and wind speed is parabolic. Additionally, the saturated wind speed threshold is 22.33 ms^-1 when regressed from drag coefficient, and it is 22.65 ms^-1 when regressed from the medium number of drag coefficient for each bin.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't