On the Limits of Taylor’s Hypothesis in Forest Clear-Cut Flow: Effects of Random Sweeping and an Elliptic Model Analysis

Taylor’s hypothesis (TH) converts temporal observations to spatial information of the flow while carrying out measurements on a micrometeorological tower. Other than TH, there exists a more general elliptic model, which converts time to space by focusing on the geometry of the space–time correlation function. In the elliptic model, TH is recovered when the space–time correlation functions are straight lines, and when TH is invalid, they are approximated as elliptic curves. To test whether TH or an elliptic model was appropriate for a highly heterogeneous forest clear-cut flow, we examined the geometry of the space–time correlation function of temperature by using an extensive distributed temperature sensing (DTS) dataset collected during daytime convective conditions at a height of 3.1 m above the clearing. This was complemented with an eddy covariance (EC) dataset that measured the turbulence characteristics. When the mean wind was parallel to a nearby forest edge, the DTS-derived space–time correlation function of temperature fluctuations resembled elliptic curves, rather than straight lines as predicted by TH. Due to large turbulence intensities, the curvatures in the space–time correlation contours were caused by the random sweeping events associated with large-scale eddies that invalidated the frozen turbulence assumption in TH. The velocity scale of these sweeping events correlated with the turbulence kinetic energy of the clear-cut flow, thereby lending support to the random sweeping hypothesis. Upon converting time to space through an elliptic and TH-based scaling, our results demonstrated that both temporal DTS and EC temperature measurements were impacted by the random sweeping events.