Dynamic properties of two-dimensional and quasi-geostrophic turbulence

Abstract: Two codes have been developed and implemented for use on massively parallelsuper computers to simulate two-dimensional and quasi-geostrophic turbulence.The codes have been found to scale well with increasing resolution and width ofthe simulations. This has allowed for the highest resolution simulations of twodimensionaland quasi-geostrophic turbulence so far reported in the literature.The direct numerical simulations have focused on the statistical characteristicsof turbulent cascades of energy and enstrophy, the role of coherent vorticesand departures from universal scaling laws, theoretized more than 40 yearsago. In particular, the investigations have concerned the enstrophy and energycascades in forced and decaying two-dimensional turbulence. Furthermore, theapplicability of Charney’s hypotheses on quasi-geostrophic turbulence has beentested. The results have shed light on the flow evolution at very large Reynoldsnumbers. The most important results are the robustness of the enstrophycascade in forced and decaying two-dimensional turbulence, the sensitivity toan infrared Reynolds number in the spectral scaling of the energy spectrumin the inverse energy cascade range, and the validation of Charney’s predictionson the dynamics of quasi-geostrophic turbulence. It has also been shownthat the scaling of the energy spectrum in the enstrophy cascade is insensitiveto intermittency in higher order statistics, but that corrections apply to the”universal” Batchelor-Kraichnan constant, as a consequence of large-scale dissipationanomalies following a classical remark by Landau (Landau & Lifshitz1987). Another finding is that the inverse energy cascade is maintained bynonlocal triad interactions, which is in contradiction with the classical localityassumption.