Abstract
The study of two-dimensional turbulence has undergone a renaissance in recent years, largely as a result of the discovery that isolated, coherent (i.e., long-lived and having a characteristic circular flow pattern) vortices spontaneously emerge from random initial conditions or forcing at large Reynolds number. Furthermore, once they emerge, the vortices dominate the subsequent flow evolution. The primary focus in these studies—as it will be for me today—has been on spatially homogeneous, temporally decaying solutions (e.g., Babiano et al., 1987; Basdevant et al., 1981; Benzi et al., 1986, 1988; Brachet et al., 1986, 1988; Herring and McWilliams, 1985; McWilliams, 1984, 1989c, 1990a; Santangelo et al., 1990).
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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McWilliams, J.C. (1991). The Coherent Vortices of Two-dimensional and Geostrophic Turbulence. In: Metais, O., Lesieur, M. (eds) Turbulence and Coherent Structures. Fluid Mechanics and Its Applications, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7904-9_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7904-9_20
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