1999/04/23 by Carl H. Gibson
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph
published as Gibson, C. H., in Physical Processes in Lakes and Oceans, Coastal and Estuarine Studies Volume 54, pages 363-376 · 16 pages, 3 figures, original of article published in IUTAM Conference Proceedings, Broome, Australia, 1995
arxiv created 1999/04/23 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
It is crucial to understand the extreme intermittency of ocean and lake turbulence and turbulent mixing in order to estimate vertical fluxes of momentum, heat and mass by Osborn-Cox flux-dissipation methods. Vast undersampling errors occur by this method when intermittency is not taken into account. Oceanic turbulence increases intermittency as the result of a self-similar nonlinear cascade covering a wide range of scales, mostly horizontal. Extremely large intermittency factors Ie and Ic measured for Galactic and oceanic turbulence are in the range 3-7. These values are consistent with the third universal similarity hypothesis for turbulence of Kolmogorov (1962) and a length scale range over 3-7 decades from viscous or diffusive to buoyancy or Coriolis force domination, where the measured universal intermittency constant mu = 0.44, Gibson (1991a), is a result of singularities in multifractal turbulence dissipation networks and their degeneration, Bershadskii and Gibson (1994). Nonlinear cascades of gravitational structure formation produce intermittent lognormal number densities of cosmological objects for the same reasons.