Heavy particle transport in a trellised agricultural canopy during non-row-aligned winds.

Agricultural systems are exposed to and influenced by particles of many types (e.g., pathogens, pollen, pests), the concentrations of which are typically highest in the regions immediately surrounding their sources. The intermittent nature of trellised canopies creates an unique canopy architecture that directly affects the shape of particulate plumes and tends to alter their transport patterns in the near-source region. To investigate the behavior of particle plumes near their sources in a trellised canopy, a set of particle release experiments was conducted during a field campaign in an Oregon vineyard in 2013. Specifically, plumes of inert fluorescent microspheres (10–45 μm diameter) were released into the canopy during periods when the mean wind direction was significantly different from the vine-row direction. Plume concentrations were collected at over 100 separate locations in a three-dimensional space <10 canopy heights downwind of the source during each release period. These plumes were more complex than those released during periods of row-aligned winds. A novel analysis approach using the superposition of two orthogonal Gaussian plume equations was developed to quantitatively assess the behavior of the plumes’ shape and its dependence on wind direction and magnitude and on particle release height. Basic plume shape parameters, as determined by integrating the superposed Gaussian equation, varied significantly as a function of the mean wind direction. As the wind direction changed from roughly row-diagonal to directly row-normal, the rate at which the spanwise plume width increased with downwind distance increased by a factor of two. Similarly, the rate at which the plume height increased with downwind distance was higher for row-perpendicular plumes than for row-diagonal plumes. Row-diagonal plumes exhibited a much higher spanwise skewness than did the row-normal plumes, but for all plumes the skewnesses tended towards zero (symmetric) with increasing downwind distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]