Effects of system rotation on diffusion of the disturbances in inhomogeneous strongly stratified flow

Abstract

This study is an extension of our previous study [O. Iida, “Turbulent structure of stably stratified inhomogeneous flow,” Phys. Fluids 30, 045101 (2018)] where direct numerical simulations of a spectral method are performed for an inhomogeneous flow under stable density stratification by the inclusion of a fringe region where an artificial body force is imposed to make the flow locally disturbed, and thus, generated disturbances are horizontally diffused into the undisturbed laminar region. In this study, moreover, additional effects of system rotation on diffused disturbances are investigated in detail. As a result, we find that rotation makes the horizontally diffused disturbances anticyclonic vortices and that with a further increase in rotation, the horizontal diffusion is significantly attenuated, and their horizontal and vertical lengths decrease and increase, respectively. In addition, it is found that attenuating the energy cascade in the vertical direction simultaneously attenuates the horizontal enlargement of anticyclonic vortices.