Related papers: Statistical mechanics of Fofonoff flows in an ocea…
A simplified thermodynamic approach of the incompressible 2D Euler equation is considered based on the conservation of energy, circulation and microscopic enstrophy. Statistical equilibrium states are obtained by maximizing the…
The minimum-enstrophy theory of Bretherton and Haidvogel postulates that two-dimensional turbulent systems evolve to a state that minimises enstrophy at a fixed energy level. We extend this to the rotating spherical quasi-geostrophic…
We study the development of mean structures in a nonlinear model of large scale ocean dynamics with bottom topography and dissipation, and forced with a noise term. We show that the presence of noise in this nonlinear model leads to…
Equilibrium statistical mechanics of two-dimensional flows provides an explanation and a prediction for the self-organization of large scale coherent structures. This theory is applied in this paper to the description of oceanic rings and…
Statistical mechanics provides an elegant explanation to the appearance of coherent structures in two-dimensional inviscid turbulence: while the fine-grained vorticity field, described by the Euler equation, becomes more and more filamented…
Oceanic geostrophic turbulence is mostly forced at the surface, yet strong bottom-trapped flows are commonly observed along topographic anomalies. Here we consider the case of a freely evolving, initially surface-intensified velocity field…
Small-scale oceanic motions, in combination with bottom topography, induce mean large-scale along-isobaths flows. The direction of these mean flows is usually found to be anticyclonic (cyclonic) over bumps (depressions). Here we employ a…
Motivated by numerical schemes for large scale geophysical flow, we consider the rotating shallow water and Boussinesq equations on the whole space with horizontal kinetic energy backscatter source terms built from negative viscosity and…
We employ a coarse-graining approach to analyze nonlinear cascades in Boussinesq flows using high-resolution simulation data. We derive budgets which resolve the evolution of energy and potential enstrophy simultaneously in space and in…
A single-layer, quasi-geostrophic (QG), large-scale ocean circulation model is developed in this paper to study available ocean current energy potentials harnessed by using the ocean current turbines. Power extraction is modeled by adding a…
We consider equations describing a barotropic inviscid flow in a channel with topography effects and beta-plane approximation of Coriolis force, in which a large-scale mean flow interacts with smaller scales. Gibbsian measures associated to…
We adapt the microcanonical framework of equilibrium statistical mechanics to predict the statistics of short waves in inhomogeneous moving media. For steady inhomogeneities and background flow, we compute the wave spectrum at any location…
The partition of enstrophy between zonal (ordered) and wavy (turbulent) components of vorticity has been studied for the beta-plane model of two-dimensional barotropic flow. An analytic estimate of the minimum value for the zonal component…
A challenge in physical oceanography is quantifying the energy content of waves and balanced flows and the fluxes that connect these reservoirs with their sources and sinks. Methodological limitations have prevented decompositions for…
Within the abstract framework of dynamical system theory we describe a general approach to the Transient (or Evans-Searles) and Steady State (or Gallavotti-Cohen) Fluctuation Theorems of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Our main…
Numerical simulations of a thin layer of turbulent flow in stably stratified conditions within the Boussinesq approximation have been performed. The statistics of energy transfer among scales have been investigated for different values of…
In recent work, Renaud, Venaille, and Bouchet (RVB) revisit the equilibrium statistical mechanics theory of the shallow water equations, within a microcanonical approach, focusing on a more careful treatment of the energy partition between…
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,…
Using a Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP), we derive a new type of relaxation equations for two-dimensional turbulent flows in the case where a prior vorticity distribution is prescribed instead of the Casimir constraints [Ellis,…
The theoretical study of the self-organization of two-dimensional and geophysical turbulent flows is addressed based on statistical mechanics methods. This review is a self-contained presentation of classical and recent works on this…