Abstract
We study nonlinearities of inertial waves in rotating turbulence. At small Rossby numbers the kinetic energy in the system is contained in helical inertial waves with time dependence amplitudes. In this regime the amplitude variations time scales are slow compared to wave periods, and the spectrum is concentrated along the dispersion relation of the waves. A nonlinear time scale was extracted from the width of the spectrum, which reflects the intensity of nonlinear wave interactions. This nonlinear time scale is found to be proportional to (U·k)-1, where k is the wave vector and U is the root-mean-square horizontal velocity, which is dominated by large scales. This correlation, which indicates the existence of turbulence in which inertial waves undergo weak nonlinear interactions, persists only for small Rossby numbers.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 122601 |
| Journal | Physical Review Fluids |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are thankful to the anonymous referee who suggested that we test the scaling which leads to the data collapse in Fig. . This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, Grant No. 866/16.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Physical Society.