Identification

Title

Turbulence comes in bursts in stably stratified flows

Abstract

There is a clear distinction between simple laminar and complex turbulent fluids; however, in some cases, as for the nocturnal planetary boundary layer, a stable and well-ordered flow can develop intense and sporadic bursts of turbulent activity that disappear slowly in time. This phenomenon is ill understood and poorly modeled and yet it is central to our understanding of weather and climate dynamics. We present here data from direct numerical simulations of stratified turbulence on grids of 20483 points that display the somewhat paradoxical result of measurably stronger events for more stable flows, not only in the temperature and vertical velocity derivatives as commonplace in turbulence, but also in the amplitude of the fields themselves, contrary to what happens for homogenous isotropic turbulent flows. A flow visualization suggests that the extreme values take place in Kelvin-Helmoltz overturning events and fronts that develop in the field variables. These results are confirmed by the analysis of a simple model that we present. The model takes into consideration only the vertical velocity and temperature fluctuations and their vertical derivatives. It indicates that in stably stratified turbulence, the stronger bursts can occur when the flow is expected to be more stable. The bursts are generated by a rapid nonlinear amplification of energy stored in waves and are associated with energetic interchanges between vertical velocity and temperature (or density) fluctuations in a range of parameters corresponding to the well-known saturation regime of stratified turbulence.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7891935

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2014-04-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact