Michael A. Sprague: Research - Rotationally Constrained Convection

 

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Rotationally Constrained Convection

 

Overview and motivation:

I became involved with this work while I was a Postdoc working with Prof. Keith Julien in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My primary contribution to this work was direct high-resolution numerical simlulations of a reduced system of nonlinear partial-differential equations valid for rotationally constrained convection (Sprague, et al., 2006). The reduced equations filter fast inertial waves and relax the need to resolve Ekman boundary layers, which allows exploration of a parameter range inaccessible with direct-numerical simulation of the full Boussinesq equations. The equations are applicable to ocean deep convection, which is characterized by small Rossby number and large Rayleigh number. Currently, we are extending our work to examine rotationally constrained convection on the tilted f-plane, and will be performing computations on the NASA Columbia super-computer under a NASA NLCS computer-time grant.

I have also done some related work with Prof. Julien and my colleague from Marseille, Dr. Eric Serre, with rapidly rotating convection in a closed cylinder.

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Rotationally constrained convection:
Pictures:

This figure shows the temperature anomaly field for rotationally constrained convection. Here, we see alignment of the vortical structures with the rotation vector. For these parameters, we also see that the columns are shielde, e.g., a hot column is surrounded by a cold shield. Click here to see the movie, and here for details.

Movies:

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Rotationally constrained convection: Relevant publications

  • Sprague, M., K. Julien, E. Knobloch, and J. Werne, Numerical simulation of an asymptotically reduced system for rotationally constrained convection, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 551, 2006, 141-174 (view pdf).

  • Sprague, M., K. Julien, E. Serre, J. Sanchez-Alvarez, and E. Crespo del Arco, Pattern Formation in Rayleigh-Benard Convection in a Rapidly Rotating Cylinder, Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Turbulence and Shear Flow Phenomena, 2005, Williamsburg, VA (view pdf).

  • Sanchez, J., E. Serre, M. Sprague, E. Crespo del Arco, F. Busse, Numerical Investigation of the Transition to Spatio-Temporal-Chaos in Rotating Rayleigh-Benard Convection, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Heat and Mass Transfer, May 17-20, 2005, Paris, France (view pdf).

  • Complete list of M.A. Sprague's publications

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Rotationally constrained convection: Grants

NASA National Leadership Computing System (NLCS) Computer-Time Grant

Project Title:
Multi-Scale Modeling and Computation of Convective Geophysical Turbulence

PI: Keith Julien (Univ. of Colorado); Co-PIs: Michael Sprague (UC Merced), Joseph Werne (NWRA), Jeffrey Weiss (Univ. of Colorado)

Some related articles:

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