Spectral Modeling of Rotating Turbulent Flows

Abstract

We test a subgrid-scale spectral model of rotating turbulent flows against direct numerical simulations. The particular case of Taylor-Green forcing at large scale is considered, a configuration that mimics the flow between two counter rotating disks as often used in the laboratory. We perform computations in the presence of moderate rotation down to Rossby numbers of 0.03, as can be encountered in the Earth atmosphere and oceans. We provide several classical measures of the degree of anisotropy of the small scales of the flows under study and conclude that an isotropic model may suffice at moderate Rossby numbers. The model, developed previously (Baerenzung et al., Phys. Rev. E 77, 046303 (2008)), incorporates eddy viscosity that depends dynamically on the inertial index of the energy spectrum, as well as eddy noise. We show that the model reproduces satisfactorily all large-scale properties of the direct numerical simulations up to Reynolds numbers of the order of 10000 and for long times after the onset of the inverse cascade of energy at low Rossby number.