Restricted equilibrium and the energy cascade in rotating and stratified flows

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Publication:3448472

DOI10.1017/JFM.2014.540zbMATH Open1327.76160arXiv1401.2103OpenAlexW2151622691MaRDI QIDQ3448472FDOQ3448472


Authors: Corentin Herbert, A. Pouquet, Raffaele Marino Edit this on Wikidata


Publication date: 23 October 2015

Published in: Journal of Fluid Mechanics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Most of the turbulent flows appearing in nature (e.g. geophysical and astrophysical flows) are subjected to strong rotation and stratification. These effects break the symmetries of classical, homogenous isotropic turbulence. In doing so, they introduce a natural decomposition of phase space in terms of wave modes and potential vorticity modes. The appearance of a new time scale associated to the propagation of waves, in addition to the eddy turnover time, increases the complexity of the energy transfers between the various scales; nonlinearly interacting waves may dominate at some scales while balanced motion may prevail at others. In the end, it is difficult to predict emph{a priori} if the energy cascades downscale as in homogeneous isotropic turbulence, upscale as expected from balanced dynamics, or follows yet another phenomenology. In this paper, we suggest a theoretical approach based on equilibrium statistical mechanics for the ideal system, inspired from the restricted partition function formalism introduced in metastability studies. In this framework, we show analytically that in the presence of rotation, when the dynamics is restricted to the slow modes, the equilibrium energy spectrum features an infrared divergence characteristic of an inverse cascade regime, whereas this is not the case for purely stratified flows.


Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.2103




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