Characteristics of chaotic attractors in atmospheric boundary-layer turbulence

In this paper, the attractors of turbulent flows in phase space are reconstructed by the time delay technique using observed data of atmospheric boundary-layer turbulence, which include high resolution temperature, humidity and three-dimensional wind speed measurements in Gansu province and Beijing, China. The correlation dimensions and largest Lyapunov exponents have been computed. The results indicate that all the largest Lyapunov exponents in different conditions of time, site and atmospheric stability are greater than zero. This means that the atmospheric boundary-layer turbulence system is really chaotic and has appropriate low-dimensional strange attractors whose dimension numbers range from 3 to 7 and vary with different variables (dynamical variables or non-dynamical variables) and atmospheric stability. Turbulent kinetic energy is first applied to reconstruct the attractor of turbulence, and is found to be feasible.