Stratification versus turbulence in complex convection

Abstract

Natural convection is usually complicated by additional factors such as rotation, shear, radiative transfer, compressibility and electromagnetic fields (in the case of electro-conductive fluids). It is shown, using results of numerical simulations and measurements in atmospheric boundary layer and solar photosphere that strong stratification can transform turbulence into deterministic chaos with exponential spectral decay of kinetic energy. When the stratification becomes weaker the deterministic chaos is replaced by the distributed chaos with stretched exponential spectral decay controlled by the second or third moments of the helicity distribution.