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Tuesday, June 03, 2008
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Seminar

Generation of Zonal Jets in Quasi-Two-Dimensional Flows

Colm Connaughton
University of Warwick, UK

Large scale zonal jets are an important feature of large scale atmospheric and oceanic flows which are often quasi-two-dimensional in character. In this talk we will compare and contrast several different methods for generating such structures in the two dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and in the Charney-Hasegawa-Mima equation which serves as an entry-level model of atmospheric dynamics. We will consider zonal flows generated by an isotropic inverse energy cascade in the presence of geometrical constraints such a biperiodic domain with an aspect ratio different from one or an external boundary. We shall also consider zonal flows generated dynamically by the modulational instability of small scale waves.

Host: Mahesh Bandi, T-CNLS and MPA-10