T010:
Recent Advances in the Fundamentals of Turbulent Flow: Relevance (and Some Irrelevance) to Oceanic Flow


Session ID#: 8228

Session Description:
Turbulence can un-mix suspended material.  Dissolved substances show mutli-scale spectra even in the absence of turbulence.  The turbulent "cascade" may not be a cascade at all.  These and other exciting developments in the fundamentals of fluid turbulence will be reviewed from the perspective of ocean sciences.  They will be selected and organized with the goal of telling a coherent story about turbulent flow that will add refinements to the commonly-taught cartoon of turbulence.  Because these new results come from homogeneous isotropic turbulence, the tutorial will identify which of these translate in a meaningful way to ocean sciences, and which are restricted to the special conditions prescribed by their genesis in aerodynamics and physics.  Specific topics include: Lagrangian views of the turbulent cascade and its breaking of time-reversal symmetry, the relationship between strain and vorticity in homogeneous isotropic turbulence, corrections to the classical picture of collision kernels, the kinematic explanation for particle clustering, scalar transport and extensions to Fickian diffusion, and the current state of universal constants.
Moderator:  Karen L Casciotti, Stanford University, Earth System Science, Stanford, United States
Primary Presenter:  Evan A Variano, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States
Index Terms:

4239 Limnology [OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL]
4568 Turbulence, diffusion, and mixing processes [OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL]
4599 General or miscellaneous [OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL]
Co-Sponsor(s):
  • A - Air-sea Interactions and Upper Ocean Processes
  • PO - Physical Oceanography/Ocean Circulation
  • TP - Turbulent Processes