Turbulent Mixing of Tracers in Nearly 2D Flows with Strong Potential Vorticity Gradients

Details Turbulent Mixing of Tracers in Nearly 2D Flows with Strong Potential Vorticity Gradients Turbulent Mixing of Tracers in Nearly 2D Flows with Strong Potential Vorticity Gradients

Nov 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004aps..dfd.jh005a&link_type=abstract

American Physical Society, 57th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, 21-23 November, 2004, Seattle, Washington, MEE

Physics

Fluid Dynamics

Scientific paper

Flows with strong vortices and/or jet streams in which the boundaries of the vortices and/or the eastward-going jet streams coincide with strong potential vorticity (p.v.) gradients are ubiquitous in geophysics and astrophysics. They can be seen in the atmosphere and oceans here on Earth as well as in the atmospheres of gas giant planets, such as Jupiter, and in numerical simulations of protoplanetary disks around newly formed stars. The chaotic movements of the vortices and jets leads to efficient transport and mixing of passive scalar tracers exterior to the vortices and in between jet streams. However, the mixing across jet streams and vortex boundaries is inhibited by the p.v. gradients. The motivation for this research is that this chaos explains the mixing of tracer molecules and heat in large parts of the Jovian atmosphere. However unless parameters are carefully and artificially tuned, the chaotic mixing in 2D simulations (and in simplified 3D models consisting of stacked 2D layers) across Jupiter's jet streams is markedly less than what is observed. We present the results of simulations and show how weak 3D motions can account for the observed mixing across p.v. gradients.

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