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This volume collects a number of theoretical and experimental lectures on various aspects of transport and mixing of active and passive particles in geophysical flows.
Transports in fluids can be approached from two complementary perspectives: in the Eulerian view of mixing, the focus is on the concentration field - advection stetches and folds the concentration field and sharpens the gradients, while diffusion smoothes the field. In the Langrangian view, fluid parcels are followed around as they move with the flow, experiencing chaotic or stochastic motion.
Both pictures are considered in the present lectures, with passive particles carried freely by the flow and reactive particles, where chemically or biologically induced reactions change the character of the particles.
List of contents
Theory.- Scalar Decay in Chaotic Mixing.- Transport of Inert and Reactive Particles: Lagrangian Statistics in Turbulent Flow.- Diffusion and Reaction-Diffusion in Steady Flows at Large Péclet Numbers.- An Introduction to Radiative Transfer for Geophysicists.- Coherent Vortices and Tracer Transport.- Experiments and Observations.- Dispersion and Mixing in Quasi-two-dimensional Rotating Flows.- Quantifying Inhomogeneous, Instantaneous, Irreversible Transport Using Passive Tracer Field as a Coordinate.- Lagrangian Statistics from Oceanic and Atmospheric Observations.- The Modulation of Biological Production by Oceanic Mesoscale Turbulence.
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From the reviews:
"The book contains original research articles by many of the world's leading researchers in geophysical fluid dynamics. ... I have read this book with great interest and pleasure. The style of presentation is clear and readable. ... this book will definitely help those who know the subject and who are interested in theoretical approaches, with a direct preference for the geophysical fluid dynamics. Graduate students of geophysics and applied mathematics interested in environmental fluid mechanics should also reference it." (Andrzej Icha, Pure and Applied Geophysics, Vol. 166, 2009)
