Tobias Oliver, Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder

Scales of Turbulence in QG Convection

I will present results from a numerical study of the reduced QG equations for planar Rayleigh-Benard convection. In particular, I will be discussing the turbulent scales of the flow and discuss how are findings suggest physics beyond the Coriolis-Inertia-Archimedean (CIA) force balance. Our simulations are characterized by what may be termed a non-local CIA balance in which the buoyancy force is dominant within the thermal boundary layers and is spatially separated from the interior Coriolis and inertial forces. While large-scale transport quantities like the Reynold's number appear to obey an inviscid scaling, we show that the length scales of the flow remain viscously controlled.