[Stoch] KITP Conference on "Eddy -- Mean-Flow Interactions in Fluids" March 24-27 in Santa Barbara

[Brad Marston]

Dear Colleagues:

We wish to bring to your attention a 4-day Conference to be held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California from March 24 to 27, 2014.  Stochastic processes will play an important role in the Conference.  

Eddy — Mean-Flow Interactions in Fluids

<http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/dbdetails?acro=waveflows-c14>

Coordinators:  Brad Marston and Steve Tobias
Scientific Advisors: Oliver Bühler, James Cho, Patrick Diamond, David Dritschel, Rick Salmon

Eddies interact with fluids and plasmas in many diverse contexts.  This four-day Conference that will provide an overview of eddy -- mean-flow interactions, and also focus on recent developments in the field.  Here we aim to bring together researchers from various fields of research to discuss issues of current interest and identify common difficulties and goals. To that end, each day of the Conference will begin with a pedagogical overview talk, aimed at describing the state-of-play in specific areas of research for a general audience.  Oliver Bühler (NYU) will speak on fundamentals of wave mean-flow interactions.  Ozgur Gurcan (CNRS) will then focus on plasmas; Sergey Nazarenko (Warwick) on weak turbulence; Gordon Ogilvie (Cambridge) on astrophysics; and Bill Young (Scripps) on geophysical fluids.  

Key questions include:  How do wave-like motions at the small scales interact with ambient rotation and stratification to produce large-scale flows (including jets, super- and differential-rotation, angular momentum transport, etc.) and coherent vortices?  What are the practical limits of reduced flow models (e.g., quasi-geostrophic, shallow-water, primitive, and Euler) that filter out different types of waves?  Atmospheres can have highly symmetric zonal mean flows, but many problems (including ocean basins) involve less symmetric flows with, for instance, time-dependent vortices.  Can theories be developed to describe such flows?  How do correlations between highly anisotropic and inhomogeneous small-scales and the large-scale motions and domain boundaries precisely arise?  What are the mechanisms that drive large-scale flows in giant planets, stars and disks?  What is the role of magnetic fields in modifying conservation laws and in driving organized flows in astrophysical bodies?  How do systematic magnetic fields and the fluctuations in those fields interact?  What is the nature of wave-flow interaction in the context of turbulence, transport, and pattern selection in magnetized plasmas – especially in tokamaks, including ITER?  An absolutely crucial element in the turbulence dynamics is the zonal flow generation by turbulent Reynolds stresses.  What is the precise mechanism for this non-local (in scale space) wave-flow interaction?  What is the physics of the magnetic counterpart of zonal flow, the zonal field, and its relation to dynamic phenomena?  

Other session talks, and a poster session, will address current research issues at the frontier of eddy -- mean-flow interactions.  The format of the Conference will leave plenty of time for discussions during long coffee and lunch breaks as well as pure discussion sessions at the end of each day.  Questions that emerge from the Conference will serve to stimulate work during the Program that runs through June 20, 2014.  

Confirmed speakers include Oliver Bühler, Ozgur Gurcan, Michael McIntyre, Sergey Nazarenko, Gordon Ogilvie, and Bill Young.  

Contributed Talks and Posters: During the conference there will be a poster session. Everyone is invited to submit an abstract for a poster or possible talk.  The deadline to submit abstracts  is February 24, 2014.  

Registration for the Conference may be made at URL <http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/dbdetails?acro=waveflows-c14> .  (Program participants who will not be in residence at the KITP during the period of the Conference should be sure to register separately for the Conference if they would like to attend it.)  

Questions?  Please contact either Brad Marston or Steve Tobias at the email addresses below.

Sincerely,

Brad Marston <marston at brown.edu>
Steve Tobias <S.M.Tobias at leeds.ac.uk>


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