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The UBL/CLU (urban boundary layer/couche limite urbaine) observation and modelling campaign is a side-project of the regional photochemistry campaign ESCOMPTE. UBL/CLU focuses on the dynamics and thermodynamics of the urban boundary layer of Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast of France. The objective of UBL/CLU is to document the four-dimensional structure of the urban boundary layer and its relation to the heat and moisture exchanges between the urban canopy and the atmosphere during periods of low wind conditions, from June 4 to July 16, 2001. The project took advantage of the comprehensive observational set-up of the ESCOMPTE campaign over the Berre-Marseille area, especially the ground-based remote sensing, airborne measurements, and the intensive documentation of the regional meteorology. Additional instrumentation was installed as part of UBL/CLU. Analysis objectives focus on (i) validation of several energy balance computational schemes such as LUMPS, TEB and SM2-U, (ii) ground truth and urban canopy signatures suitable for the estimation of urban albedos and aerodynamic surface temperatures from satellite data, (iii) high resolution mapping of urban land cover, land-use and aerodynamic parameters used in UBL models, and (iv) testing the ability of high resolution atmospheric models to simulate the structure of the UBL during land and sea breezes, and the related transport and diffusion of pollutants over different districts of the city. This paper presents initial results from such analyses and details of the overall experimental set-up.Ã

High-frequency fluctuations of temperature and of longitudinal and vertical velocity components have been measured with high-resolution probes in order to test the local-isotropy assumption. The simultaneous measurements of u’, w’, θ’ and the measurements in two space points with various separations in either the longitudinal or transverse directions were made in the large boundary layer (Rλ = 616) of the I.M.S.T. Air-Sea Interaction Simulation Tunnel. There is consistent evidence that the local-isotropy assumption is satisfied by the velocity field at all scales smaller than twenty times the Kolmogorov microscale (η ≈ 0.27 × 10−3 m), i.e. in the dissipative range of scales but not in the expected inertial subrange. The direct comparisons of the lateral and longitudinal temperature autocorrelation and structure functions show that the temperature field does not verify the isotropy assumption at all scales greater thanor equal to 37 and presumably at even smaller scales. This is confirmed by the study of the temperature-increment skewness and flatness factors. The spectral distribution -of the non-zero derivative skewness (S(θ) = +0.9) shows that it is essentially contributed by those scales for which the dynamic field satisfies isotropy.