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A Barometric Survey of Dust-Devil Vortices on a Desert Playa

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Abstract

Dust devils, and other columnar vortices, are associated with local surface pressure drops that can be observed in time-series data on both Earth and Mars. High cadence measurements are needed to resolve these small structures, and we report a month-long survey (June/July 2012) on a Nevada desert playa using microbarographs sampled multiple times per second. Candidate dust-devil signatures are classified, with detections being robust at about one per day for pressure drops exceeding 0.3 hPa (roughly a 5:1 signal-to-noise threshold, where the observed noise level corresponds reasonably well with the dynamic pressure associated with the estimate convective velocity scale). The vortex population is evaluated and compared with those observed on Mars: a broken power law or a more convex distribution describes the terrestrial data. A single station observes about three events per week (for normalized pressure drops of 0.06 %), about three times fewer than Mars observations for the same normalized drop. We find evidence for clustering of vortex events in a pseudo-periodic manner with a 20-min period, consistent with the size of boundary-layer convection cells.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by NASA through the Mars Fundamental Research Program Grant Number NNX12AI04G. Brian Jackson and Jani Radebaugh are thanked for assistance in the field. The referees made a number of suggestions that improved the manuscript, notably in suggesting the use of the convective velocity scale.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD , 20723, USA

    Ralph D. Lorenz

  2. Department of Physical Science, College of Southern Nevada, 700 College Dr., Henderson, NV , 89002, USA

    Peter D. Lanagan

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  1. Ralph D. Lorenz
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  2. Peter D. Lanagan
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Correspondence to Ralph D. Lorenz.

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Lorenz, R.D., Lanagan, P.D. A Barometric Survey of Dust-Devil Vortices on a Desert Playa. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 153, 555–568 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-014-9954-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-014-9954-y

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