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Scaling laws in a turbulent baroclinic instability. (English) Zbl 0887.76030

The authors consider flow fields resulting from strong baroclinic instabilities of atmospheric jet flows as large scale turbulence at infinite Reynolds number. Such turbulent fields are characterized by simple scaling laws. The authors perform a scale analysis of such flows considering clouds as passive tracers and using satellite cloud images. Two distinct scaling regions are found. Results are compared with the Kolmogorov scaling theory, and the self-similarity is tested by using the wavelet transformations.

MSC:

76F99 Turbulence
76E20 Stability and instability of geophysical and astrophysical flows
86A10 Meteorology and atmospheric physics
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