View article

A technique is presented to derive the dissipation of turbulent kinetic energy ϵ by using the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) to fit a theoretical or known empirical model to turbulence shear spectral observations. The commonly used integration method relies on integrating the shear spectra in the viscous range, thus requiring the resolution of the highest wavenumbers of the turbulence shear spectrum. With current technology, the viscous range is not resolved at sufficiently large wavenumbers to estimate high ϵ ; however, long inertial subranges can be resolved, making spectral fitting over both this subrange and the resolved portion of the viscous range an attractive method for deriving ϵ . The MLE takes into account the chi-distributed properties of the spectral observations, and so it does not rely on the log-transformed spectral observations. This fitting …