Abstract

I will be talking about my summer research project from the Woods Hole GFD programme.

KH instabilities are widespread in nature and a dominant form of stratified shear instability. The primary billow is well understood, with the classical Miles–Howard stability condition, Ri>1/4. In this talk, we are interested in the secondary instabilities that arise as the primary billow develops. The occurrence and precise nature of these secondary instabilities is crucial for understanding the transition to turbulence and mixing. In particular, we focus on secondary shear instabilities that form on the braid, motivated by estuarine observations. We investigate these using 2D DNS and compare the results with a reduced inviscid model.

This is an informal lunchtime seminar, please bring along your lunch.