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The shape of vortices in quasi-geostrophic turbulence. (English) Zbl 1022.76025

From the summary: The work discusses the most commonly occurring shape of coherent vortical structures in rapidly rotating stably stratified turbulence, under the quasi-geostrophic approximation. In decaying turbulence, these vortices – coherent regions of the materially-invariant potential vorticity – dominate the flow evolution, and indeed the flow evolution is governed by their interactions. An analysis of several exceptionally high-resolution simulations of quasi-geostrophic turbulence is performed. The results indicate that the population of vortices exhibits a mean height-to-width aspect ratio less than unity, in fact close to 0.8. This finding is justified here by a simple model, in which vortices are taken to be ellipsoids of uniform potential vorticity.

MSC:

76F45 Stratification effects in turbulence
76U05 General theory of rotating fluids
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