Descripción: We examine the decomposition of forced Taylor-Green and Arn'old-Beltrami-Childress (ABC) flows into coherent and incoherent components using an orthonormal wavelet decomposition. We ask whether wavelet coefficient thresholding based on the Donoho-Johnstone criterion can extract a coherent vortex signal while leaving behind Gaussian random noise. We find that no threshold yields a strictly Gaussian incoherent component, and that the most Gaussian incoherent flow is found for data compression lower than that achieved with the fully iterated Donoho-Johnstone threshold. Moreover, even at such low compression, the incoherent component shows clear signs of large-scale spatial correlations that are signatures of the forcings used to drive the flows. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.

Descripción: This paper discusses the general atmospheric circulation over Patagonia on the basis of the principal palaeoclimate forcings: continental drift, orography, variations in the greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, evolution of the atmosphere and the oceans, changes in the orbit of the Earth, albedo feedbacks, and the land surface. These processes affect climate on time scales of millions to hundreds of thousands of years. Additionally, orbital forcing has had a major influence on climate during the Quaternary. The palaeo-atmospheric circulation of Patagonia is analyzed for the Early to Late Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Late Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the Tortonian-Oligocene cooling, the Pliocene, the Quaternary including the Last Glacial Maximum, the Holocene Optimum, and the last millennium changes. Alternative palaeo-atmospheric circulations from climatic modelling scenarios through the ages are reviewed and compared with proxy data. Detailed and updated reference information on the topics analyzed is also provided. © 2011 The Linnean Society of London.

Descripción: Rapidly rotating turbulent flow is characterized by the emergence of columnar structures that are representative of quasi-two-dimensional behavior of the flow. It is known that when energy is injected into the fluid at an intermediate scale L f, it cascades towards smaller as well as larger scales. In this paper we analyze the flow in the inverse cascade range at a small but fixed Rossby number, Ro f≈0.05. Several numerical simulations with helical and nonhelical forcing functions are considered in periodic boxes with unit aspect ratio. In order to resolve the inverse cascade range with reasonably large Reynolds number, the analysis is based on large eddy simulations which include the effect of helicity on eddy viscosity and eddy noise. Thus, we model the small scales and resolve explicitly the large scales. We show that the large-scale energy spectrum has at least two solutions: one that is consistent with Kolmogorov-Kraichnan-Batchelor-Leith phenomenology for the inverse cascade of energy in two-dimensional (2D) turbulence with a ∼k⊥-5/3 scaling, and the other that corresponds to a steeper ∼k⊥-3 spectrum in which the three-dimensional (3D) modes release a substantial fraction of their energy per unit time to the 2D modes. The spectrum that emerges depends on the anisotropy of the forcing function, the former solution prevailing for forcings in which more energy is injected into the 2D modes while the latter prevails for isotropic forcing. In the case of anisotropic forcing, whence the energy goes from the 2D to the 3D modes at low wave numbers, large-scale shear is created, resulting in a time scale τ sh, associated with shear, thereby producing a ∼k -1 spectrum for the total energy with the horizontal energy of the 2D modes still following a ∼k⊥-5/3 scaling. © 2012 American Physical Society.