International audienceA new formulation of the spectral energy budget of kinetic and available potential energies of the atmosphere is derived, with spherical harmonics as base functions. Compared to previous formulations, there are three main improvements: (i) the topography is taken into account, (ii) the exact three-dimensional advection terms are considered, and (iii) the vertical flux is separated from the energy transfer between different spherical harmonics. Using this formulation, results from two different high-resolution GCMs are analyzed: the Atmospheric GCM for the Earth Simulator (AFES) T639L24 and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Integrated Forecast System (IFS) T1279L91. The spectral fluxes show that the AFES, which reproduces quite realistic horizontal spectra with a k−5/3 inertial range at the mesoscales, simulates a strong downscale energy cascade. In contrast, neither the k−5/3 vertically integrated spectra nor the downscale energy cascade are produced by the ECMWF IFS

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International audienceThis paper builds upon the investigation of Augier et al. (Phys. Fluids, vol. 26 (4), 2014) in which a strongly stratified turbulent-like flow was forced by 12 generators of vertical columnar dipoles. In experiments, measurements start to provide evidence of the existence of a strongly stratified inertial range that has been predicted for large turbulent buoyancy Reynolds numbers R t = ε K /(νN 2), where ε K is the mean dissipation rate of kinetic energy, ν the viscosity and N the Brunt–Väisälä frequency. However, because of experimental constraints, the buoyancy Reynolds number could not be increased to sufficiently large values so that the inertial strongly stratified turbulent range is only incipient. In order to extend the experimental results toward higher buoyancy Reynolds number, we have performed numerical simulations of forced stratified flows. To reproduce the experimental vortex generators, columnar dipoles are periodically produced in spatial space using impulsive horizontal body force at the peripheries of the computational domain. For moderate buoyancy Reynolds number, these numerical simulations are able to reproduce the results obtained in the experiments, validating this particular forcing. For higher buoyancy Reynolds number, the simulations show that the flow becomes turbulent as observed in Brethouwer et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 585, 2007, pp. 343–368). However, the statistically stationary flow is horizontally inhomogeneous because the dipoles are destabilized quite rapidly after their generation. In order to produce horizontally homogeneous turbulence, high-resolution simulations at high buoyancy Reynolds number have been carried out with a slightly modified forcing in which dipoles are forced at random locations in the computational domain. The unidimensional horizontal spectra of kinetic and potential energies scale like C 1