Inhomogeneous two-dimensional turbulence in the atmosphere

Shepherd, T. G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6631-9968 (1987) Inhomogeneous two-dimensional turbulence in the atmosphere. In: Comte-Bellot, G. and Mathieu, J. (eds.) Advances in turbulence. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 269-278. ISBN 978-3-642-83047-1 doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-83045-7_31

Abstract/Summary

Faced with the strongly nonlinear and apparently random behaviour of the energy-containing scales in the atmosphere, geophysical fluid dynamicists have attempted to understand the synoptic-scale atmospheric flow within the context of two-dimensional homogeneous turbulence theory (e.g. FJØRTOFT [1]; LEITH [2]). However atmospheric observations (BOER and SHEPHERD [3] and Fig.1) show that the synoptic-scale transient flow evolves in the presence of a planetary-scale, quasi-stationary background flow which is approximately zonal (east-west). Classical homogeneous 2-D turbulence theory is therefore not strictly applicable to the transient flow. One is led instead to study 2-D turbulence in the presence of a large-scale (barotropically stable) zonal jet inhomogeneity.