Intermittency of internal wave shear and turbulence dissipation

Abstract

It is crucial to understand the extreme intermittency of ocean and lake turbulence and turbulent mixing in order to estimate vertical fluxes of momentum, heat and mass by Osborn-Cox flux-dissipation methods. Vast undersampling errors occur by this method when intermittency is not taken into account. Oceanic turbulence increases intermittency as the result of a self-similar nonlinear cascade covering a wide range of scales, mostly horizontal. Extremely large intermittency factors Ie and Ic measured for Galactic and oceanic turbulence are in the range 3-7. These values are consistent with the third universal similarity hypothesis for turbulence of Kolmogorov (1962) and a length scale range over 3-7 decades from viscous or diffusive to buoyancy or Coriolis force domination, where the measured universal intermittency constant m_u = 0.44, Gibson (1991a), is a result of singularities in multifractal turbulence dissipation networks and their degeneration, Bershadskii and Gibson (1994). Nonlinear cascades of gravitational structure formation produce intermittent lognormal number densities of cosmological objects for the same reasons.