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“What drives weather changes”

Date:

Download-files:

Time:

Thursday, 29. Sept 2016

Video-Recording for any system with MP4-support

- Video.mp4 (ca.274 Mb)

15:15 – 16:15

Speaker: Gregory Falkovich (Weizmann Institute)

Abstract :

Winds are driven by the gradients of solar heating. Vertical gradients cause thermal

convection on the scale of the troposphere depth (less than 10 km).

Horizontal gradients excite motions on a planetary (10000 km) and smaller scales.

Weather is mostly determined by the flows at intermediate scale (hundreds of kilometers).

Where these flows get their energy from? The puzzle is that three-dimensional small-scale

motions cannot transfer energy to larger scales while large-scale planar motions cannot

transfer energy to smaller scales.

In the talk, I'll describe experimental and observational data that suggest one possible

resolution of this puzzle. I also describe some puzzling properties of two-dimensional

turbulence including conformal invariance of statistics.