Estimating Intermittency Exponent in Neutrally Stratified Atmospheric Surface Layer Flows: A Robust Framework based on Magnitude Cumulant and Surrogate Analyses

This study proposes a novel framework based on magnitude cumulant and surrogate analyses to reliably detect and estimate the intermittency coefficient from short-length coarse-resolution turbulent time series. Intermittency coefficients estimated from a large number of neutrally stratified atmospheric surface layer turbulent series from various field campaigns are shown to remarkably concur with well-known laboratory experimental results. In addition, a surrogate-based hypothesis testing framework is proposed and shown to significantly reduce the likelihood of detecting a spurious non-zero intermittency coefficient from non-intermittent series. The discriminatory power of the proposed framework is promising for addressing the unresolved question of how atmospheric stability affects the intermittency properties of boundary layer turbulence