Related papers: Bottom-trapped currents as statistical equilibrium…
There is a clear distinction between simple laminar and complex turbulent fluids. But 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…
Randomly-forced fluid flow in the presence of scale-unselective dissipation develops mean currents following topographic contours. Known mechanisms based on the scale-selective action of damping processes are not at work in this situation.…
We conduct depth-resolved three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of bi-disperse turbidity currents interacting with complex bottom topography in the form of a Gaussian bump. Several flow characteristics such as suspended…
Quasigeostrophic flows are induced by spatial variations in interior potential vorticity and boundary buoyancy. We begin by developing the geostrophic turbulence theory of boundary buoyancy anomalies in a fluid with vanishing potential…
The propagation of surface water waves interacting with a current and an uneven bottom is studied. Such a situation is typical for ocean waves where the winds generate currents in the top layer of the ocean. The role of the bottom…
The flow structures beneath waves have received significant attention from both theoretical and numerical perspectives. Most studies on this topic assume a flat bottom, leading to questions about the effects of variable bottom topography.…
The dimensionality of turbulence in fluid layers determines their properties. We study electromagnetically driven flows in finite depth fluid layers and show that eddy viscosity, which appears as a result of three-dimensional motions, leads…
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…
In this perspective, we consider the development of statistical hydrodynamics, focusing on the way in which the intrinsic stochasticity of turbulent phenomena was identified and is being explored. A major purpose of our discussion is to…
Geophysical turbulence is observed to self-organize into large-scale flows such as zonal jets and coherent vortices. Previous studies on barotropic beta-plane turbulence have shown that coherent flows emerge out of a background of…
Many turbulent flows encountered in nature -- seas, oceans and rivers -- are bounded by a deformable free surface. A question that remained to be fully explored is to what extent the underlying turbulent flow field can be revealed solely by…
In this study we give a characterization of semi-geostrophic turbulence by performing freely decaying simulations for the case of constant uniform potential vorticity, a set of equations known as surface semi-geostrophic approximation. The…
We investigate the non-linear equilibration of a two-layer quasi-geostrophic flow in a channel forced by an imposed unstable zonal mean flow, paying particular attention to the role of bottom friction. In the limit of low bottom friction,…
Recent studies indicate that altimetric observations of the ocean's mesoscale eddy field reflect the combined influence of surface buoyancy and interior potential vorticity anomalies. The former have a surface-trapped structure, while the…
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…
Although the equations governing fluid flow are well known, there are no analytical expressions that describe the complexity of turbulent motion. A recent proposition is that in analogy to low dimensional chaotic systems, turbulence is…
Turbulent flows over wavy surfaces give rise to the formation of ripples, dunes and other natural bedforms. To predict how much sediment these flows transport, research has focused mainly on basal shear stress, which peaks upstream of the…
We observe the emergence of strong vertical drafts in direct numerical simulations of the Boussinesq equations in a range of parameters of geophysical interest. These structures, which appear intermittently in space and time, generate…
We derive general depth-integrated model equations for overland flows featuring the evolution of suspended sediment that may be eroded from or deposited onto the underlying topography ('morphodynamics'). The resulting equations include…
Topological entropy serves as a viable candidate for quantifying mixing and complexity of a highly chaotic system. Particularly in turbulence, this is determined as the exponential stretching rate of a fluid material line that typically…