TABLE OF CONTENTS Piotr K. Smolarkiewicz and Len G. Margolin
Prediction of the Earth s climate and weather is difficult in large part because of the ubiquity of turbulence in the atmosphere and oceans. Geophysical flows evince fluid motions ranging from dissipation scales as small as a fraction of a millimeter to planetary scales of thousands of kilometers. The span in time scales (from a fraction of a second to many years) is equally large. Turbulence in the atmosphere and the oceans is generated by heating and by boundary stresses just as in engineering flows. However, geophysical flows are further complicated by planetary rotation and density temperature stratification, which lead to phenomena not commonly found in engineering applications. In particular, rotating stratified fluids can support a variety of inertia-gravity and planetary waves. When the amplitude of such a wave becomes sufficiently large (i.e., comparable to the wavelength), the wave can break, generating a localized burst of turbulence. If one could see the phenomena that occur internally in geophysical flows at any scale, one would be reminded of familiar pictures of white water in a mountain stream or of breaking surf on a beach. The multiphase thermodynamics of atmosphere and oceans due to ubiquity of water substance and salt, respectively adds complexity of its own.
Because of...
