The coexistence of wave‐like submeso motions and anisotropic intermittent turbulence in a night‐time stable boundary layer is investigated. Submeso motions of different characteristics and amplitudes interact with each other. These interactions may lead to intermittent turbulence production which alters the turbulent structure of the stable boundary layer. On the other hand, the production and transfer of turbulence affect the delicate balance of submeso motions. In this work, sonic anemometer data collected at 11 levels in southeastern Brazil have been used to study a case of a nocturnal boundary layer at a coastal site. The absence of forcing at the synoptic scale allows the development of a breeze circulation on which a low‐level jet of moderate intensity (4 m s−1) and low height (about 50 m) takes place. The jet evolution is coupled with dirty waves, while its full development is associated with gravity waves driven by a strong vertical temperature gradient. The layer centred at the low‐level jet nose is characterized by horizontal meandering and very weak turbulence intensity. The air far below and above the low‐level jet maximum experiences bursts of significant increase of the turbulence intensity, showing a three‐layer structure. The oscillations of the horizontal wind components exhibit the same frequency as the temperature oscillations, suggesting that the presence of an adequate temperature horizontal gradient is one of the fundamental drivers of the meandering phenomenon. The considered night has been studied by means of the Eulerian auto‐correlation functions for the detection of the meandering hours and their oscillation time‐scales, and by means of the continuous Morlet wavelet function for the detection of the gravity waves and the characterization of their spatial time‐scales and temporal evolution.

The nocturnal boundary‐layer regime transition from weakly stable (strong wind) to very stable (weak wind) is analyzed using 10 levels of turbulence observations made at a 140 m micrometeorological mast near the southeastern Brazilian coast. The combination of synoptic and local flow favors the systematic occurrence of such a transition, typically 5 to 7 h after sunset. The regime transition is marked by decreases in temperature, wind speed, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) and absolute heat flux. The decrease in temperature is often abrupt and the inflection point in the temperature series marks the regime transition. Absolute heat flux peaks before the transition during the weakly stable period, while temperature variance peaks near the transition. Composites from 36 cases when the cooling rate exceeded 2 °C/h are used to describe the vertical structure of the stable boundary layer (SBL) in both regimes. For these abrupt transitions, dimensionless variables that relate thermal and mechanical properties of the flow are compared as indicators of the SBL regime, and the gradient Richardson number is found to be better for that purpose. The absolute heat flux is shown to be proportional to the cube of the wind speed only in the strong wind limit of the very stable regime. Simulations of similar transitions using a second‐order model are described in Part II.

A 140-m micrometeorological tower provides detailed observations of the vertical structure of the mean and turbulent fields of meteorological variables of a coastal region in southeastern Brazil, and reveals the extent to which a nearby power plant affects the local atmospheric boundary layer.

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Turbulent wind data measured by sonic anemometers installed at various heights on a 140-m-tall micrometeorological tower located at a coastal site are used to obtain vertical profiles of the velocity standard deviations σi, Lagrangian decorrelation local time scales TLi, and eddy diffusivities Kα for distinct stability conditions. The novelty of the study lies in the use of turbulent data directly measured over the extension of the atmospheric surface layer at a coastal site for that purpose. Furthermore, the approach employs the Hilbert–Huang transform to determine the wind energy spectral peak frequencies. These are applied to the asymptotic spectral equation from Taylor statistical diffusion theory to obtain the turbulent dispersion parameters, which are shown to generally agree well with those provided by a classical autocorrelation approach. For neutral and stable situations the vertical profiles of momentum eddy diffusivities agree well with those derived from the spectral and autocorrelation method. Additionally, the turbulent integral time scales and eddy diffusivities determined by the method at a coastal location are found to overestimate those predicted from analytical expressions based on continental field observations. The turbulence parameters found are suitable to be employed in air pollution dispersion models.