Large-scale lognormality in turbulence modeled by Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process

Abstract

Lognormality was found experimentally for coarse-grained squared turbulence velocity and velocity increment when the coarsening scale is comparable to the correlation scale of the velocity (Mouri et al. Phys. Fluids 21, 065107, 2009). We investigate this large-scale lognormality by using a simple stochastic process with correlation, the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process. It is shown that the OU process has a similar large-scale lognormality, which is studied numerically and analytically.