1 July - 19 December 1996
Organisers:JCR Hunt (UK Meteorological Office), ME McIntyre (Cambridge), J Norbury (Oxford), I Roulstone (UK Meteorological Office)
A preliminary programme can be found here.
Vortices are generic features of geophysical flows. They seem to be dynamically important and their interactions seem to be responsible for the nonlinearity and intermittency of the flow. Because vortex interactions are rare and very localized in physical space the classical statistical methods cannot take them into account correctly. This workshop will focus on the challenge of developing new statistical theories of turbulent flows that incorporate recent discoveries of the prominent role played by vortices.
We shall explore the statistical methods that have been proposed to analyse, model and compute turbulent flows, taking into account their vortices. The first week will emphasize the statistical vortex theories of two-dimensional turbulence and compare point-vortex models with vorticity-patch models. The second week will study the formation, stability and dynamics of vortices in geophysical flows and how to describe them statistically.