Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Atmospheric turbulence is a complex phenomenon, characterized by the presence of a plethora of scales (eddies) ranging from small viscosity-dominated to large energy-containing structures. Turbulence may undergo large space and time variations due to rapidly changing external conditions, it may be locally suppressed or enhanced. In this presentation we address non-equlibrium states where, because of non-stationarity, turbulence deviates from the classical Kolmogorov's picture. Such states can be described by different, non-classical scaling relations, which, however, appear to be universal. Based on these theoretical analyses we show that it is possible to retrieve information on temporal tendencies in a given flow. We focus on the stratocumulus-topped boundary layers and investigate data available from field measurements performed by research aircrafts.