event
Thursday 10 May 2012: Self organisation of shear flows (Taylor and Francis sponsored)
Dr Andrew Newton - University of Sheffield
LT 004 15:00-16:00
Systems that exhibit self organisation generally have a small
scale/fluctuating behavior of incalculable complexity that gives rise
to a decentralized mean behavior. This is true of zonal shear flows
whereby large scale flows form, sometimes inexplicably, from a highly
stochastic background turbulence. I will discuss growth of zonal flows
as a self regulating competition between local destabilisation and the
2d inverse energy cascade. A remarkably simple analytical model is
shown to accurately capture the essential physics of shear flow self
organisation and hint at what a signature of self organisation might
be. Through using several numerical models this signature is refined
and shown to be present in observations of Jupiters zonal flows.
