Groundbreaking for DONUTSS-2011 field campaign

Research: today was ground-breaking (ceremony) for this year's summer experiment DONUTSS-2011 at the Botany & Plant Pathology Lab when Matthias Zeeman dug the first trenches that will hold the wooden framework to suspend the optical fibers used in the heart of the experiment: a large quasi three-dimensional array of optical fibers sampled by the laser-based distributed temperature sensing (DTS) technique will allow sampling of the thermal structure of the near-surface flow in unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. Temperature measurements from DTS will be complemented by wind, humidity, and turbulence observations from a network of sonic anemometers, paired ground-based acoustic remote sounders, and fog releases to study the weak wind, stable boundary layers. The acronym 'DONUTSS' stands for Direct Observation of Near-sUrface Turbulent and Submeso Structures. The experiment is funded by the Army Research office and the National Science Foundation.