The influence of hilly terrain on aerosol-sized particle deposition into forested canopies

Virtually all reviews dealing with aerosol-sized particle deposition onto forested ecosystems stress the significance of topographic variations, yet only a handful of studies considered the effects of these variations on the deposition velocity (Vd). Here, the interplay between the foliage collection mechanisms within a dense canopy for different particle sizes and the flow dynamics for a neutrally stratified boundary layer on a gentle and repeating cosine hill are considered. In particular, how topography alters the spatial structure of Vd and its two constitutive components, particle fluxes and particle mean concentration within and immediately above the canopy, is examined in reference to a uniform flat-terrain case. A two-dimensional and particle-size resolving model based on first-order closure principles that explicitly accounts for (i) the flow dynamics, including the two advective terms, (ii) the spatial variation in turbulent viscosity, and (iii) the three foliage collection mechanisms that include Brownian diffusion, turbo-phoresis, and inertial impaction is developed and used. The model calculations suggest that, individually, the advective terms can be large just above the canopy and comparable to the canopy collection mechanisms in magnitude but tend to be opposite to each other in sign. Moreover, these two advective terms are not precisely out of phase with each other, and hence, do not readily cancel each other upon averaging across the hill wavelength. For the larger aerosol-sized particles, differences between flat-terrain and hill-averaged Vd can be significant, especially in the layers just above the canopy. We also found that the hill-induced variations in turbulent shear stress, which are out-of-phase with the topography in the canopy sublayer, play a significant role in explaining variations in Vd across the hill near the canopy top. Just after the hill summit, the model results suggest that Vd fell to 30% of its flat terrain value for particle sizes in the range of 1-10 μm. This reduction appears consistent with maximum reductions reported in wind-tunnel experiments for similar sized particle deposition on ridges with no canopies. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Duke Scholars

Author Gabriel G. Katul Civil and Environmental Engineering