Determining the cascade of passive scalar variance in the lower stratosphere

Diagnosis of magnetic structures and intermittency in space-plasma turbulence using the technique of surrogate data

Intermittency is usually identified in turbulent flows as non-Gaussian tails of the probability density functions (PDFs) of the turbulent field derivatives. Here we investigate the role of phase coherence among the Fourier modes in creating intermittency in magnetized space plasmas using the technique of surrogate data. We apply the technique to two examples: (i) synthetic data and (ii) magnetic field fluctuations recorded in the terrestrial magnetosheath by the Cluster spacecraft. We use a set of four series of data, one observed and three surrogate, and their PDFs and moments (q < or = 4) as discriminating statistics. We show that the technique allows for detecting coherent structures and estimating their scales. We show furthermore that the phases, but not the amplitudes, create the non-Gaussian tails of the PDFs. We show also that the surrogate data used cannot account for asymmetries of the PDFs of the observed data. This enables us to confirm a scenario of turbulent cascade of mirror structures proposed in previous publications, by showing the existence of an approximately constant energy flux in the inertial range.

23/9 dimensional anisotropic scaling of passive admixtures using lidar data of aerosols

In buoyancy-driven flows, another dimensional quantity appears in addition to the energy flux. Classically, this leads to the prediction that at large scales, isotropic Bolgiano-Obukhov (BO) scaling can dominate isotropic Kolmogorov scaling. We investigate this in the atmosphere by using state-of-the-art high-powered lidar data. We examine simultaneous horizontal and vertical sections of passive scalar surrogates over the ranges 100 m to 120 km and 3 m to 4.5 km , respectively. Overall, this spans the crucial "mesoscale" and involves nearly 1000 times more data than the largest relevant experiments to date. Rather than a transition from one isotropic regime to another, we find that the two regimes always coexist in an anisotropic Corrsin-Obukhov law with the Kolmogorov holding in the horizontal, and the BO holding in the vertical. The stratification is quantified by an elliptical dimension D(el) found to be equal to 2.55+/-0.02 . This anisotropic scaling is very close to that predicted by the 23/9 dimensional unified scaling model of the atmosphere and is consistent with observations of the horizontal wind.