Baroclinic instability in a narrow aspect ratio channel |
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What is striking about the simulations is that all initial
conditions appear to settle into similar patterns of behavior, consisting of episodes
of highly ordered motion drifting streamwise,
interspersed by turbulent spirals.
This observation motivates the numerical search for such solutions in narrow aspect ratio cells, sufficiently large to accommodate several unstable baroclinic spirals. So far we have not found any of the exact solutions that we are seeking for. Instead, in what follows, we shall motivate the general strategy by a related unstable channelflow problem, the plane Couette flow. |