Applied Scientific Research 59: 89–110, 1998.
© 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
89
Report on Turbulence and Mixing in
Geophysical Flows II
J.M. REDONDO
Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B5,
08034 Barcelona, Spain
P.F. LINDEN
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Silver
Street, Cambridge CB3 9EW, U.K.
Abstract. We describe the presentations at the international meeting/workshop on Mixing in Geo-
physical Flows that took place at Vilanova i la Geltru, near Barcelona during the 20, 21 and 22nd
of March 1997. There were more than 100 participants from 20 countries with 66 oral and poster
presentations covering experimental and theoretical aspects of rotating and stratified fluids as well as
field observations. The main topics discussed at the workshop were stratified flows, rotating stratified
flows, gravity waves, instabilities and mixing, convection, experiments and numerical simulations
of Geophysical flows and turbulent mixing. The papers are summarised in this report giving a
state-of-the-art overview of present research in geophysical turbulent mixing.
Key words: turbulent mixing, stratified flows, geophysical flows.
1. Introduction
Flows where both the velocity and density vary with height arise naturally. Un-
derstanding both the fundamental processes which trigger transition to turbulence
and also the mixing properties of the ensuing turbulence itself is essential to the
parameterization of the redistribution of important quantities such as moisture,
heat, momentum and pollutants within geophysical flows.
The workshop addressed a wide range of geophysical mixing processes through
8 invited talks, 30 oral contributions and 28 posters. Approximately one third of the
papers discussed experimental research, one quarter dealt with theoretical matters
and a further quarter discussed numerical studies while the remainder of the contri-
butions were related to geophysical observations. This mix of approaches provided
a broad spectrum of mixing processes and a nice balance of the methods used to
address the problems associated with them. Topics were discussed in contributed
papers mainly falling under categories determined by an invited review paper.
The conference opened with a discussion of mixing processes in stably stratified
fluids where the mixing is produced by some imposed turbulence. These processes