Variation in wind speed and surface shear stress from open floor to porous parallel windbreaks: A wind tunnel study

As vegetative windbreaks become established on a large scale in agricultural ecosystems, understanding the influence of windbreak networks on the momentum budget of the atmospheric boundary layer becomes important. The authors conducted a wind tunnel experiment to study the variation of wind speed profile and surface shear stress of wind flow passing from an open surface to another with parallel windbreaks. Five spacing (L = 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 h, wherein h is the windbreak height) windbreak arrays with moderate porosity (aerodynamic porosity alpha = 0.501) were used in the experiments. Both near-floor and over-array wind speed measurements showed that airflow will approach equilibrium state behind a special windbreak of the array, varying from 4th to 9th windbreak when the spacing change from 30 to 5 h. Within the range of L/h values investigated, arrays with narrower spacing cause higher friction velocity and roughness length, which were up to 2.26 and nearly 100 times those observed over open floor, respectively. A semiempirical momentum budget model is developed on the arrayed surface to estimate windbreak drag and shear stress on the protected floor. Windbreak drag accounts for more than 80% of shear stress on the arrayed surface, and the shear stress on protected floor is less than 20% when L/h < 40 based on the model estimation. The sum of the two estimated components agrees well with the estimates obtained from over-array wind profiles.