Cyclone-Anticyclone Asymmetry in Geophysical Turbulence

Anisotropy and cyclone-anticyclone asymmetry in decaying rotating turbulence

The effect of a background rotation on the decay of homogeneous turbulence produced by a grid is experimentally investigated. Experiments have been performed in a channel mounted in the large-scale ’Coriolis’ rotating platform, and measurements have been carried out in the planes normal and parallel to the rotation axis using particle image velocimetry. After a short period of about 0.4 tank ro...

Cyclone-anticyclone asymmetry of large-scale wakes in the laboratory

We performed an experimental study of large-scale wakes in a rotating shallow-water layer. Standard particle image velocimetry was used to measure the horizontal velocity field, while a laser-induced fluorescence technique was used to measure the geopotential deviation i.e., the interface deviation . According to these measurements, we were able to quantify the dynamics in a wide region of para...

The coherent structures of shallow-water turbulence: Deformation-radius effects, cyclone/anticyclone asymmetry and gravity-wave generation.

Over a large range of Rossby and Froude numbers, we investigate the dynamics of initially balanced decaying turbulence in a shallow rotating fluid layer. As in the case of incompressible two-dimensional decaying turbulence, coherent vortex structures spontaneously emerge from the initially random flow. However, owing to the presence of a free surface, a wealth of new phenomena appear in the sha...

Geophysical Turbulence Geophysical Turbulence

The true asymmetry between synoptic cyclone and anticyclone amplitudes: Implications for filtering methods in Lagrangian feature tracking