No Arabic abstract
Coastal tidal estuaries are vital to the exchange of energy and material between inland waters and the open ocean. Debris originating from the land and ocean enter this environment and are transported by currents (river outflow and tide), wind, waves and density gradients. Understanding and predicting the source and fate of such debris has considerable environmental, economic and visual importance. We show that this issue can be addressed using the Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS) technique which is highly robust to hydrodynamic model uncertainties. Here we present a comprehensive study showing the utility of this approach to describe the fate of floating material in a coastal tidal embayment. An example is given from Moreton Bay, a semi-enclosed subtropical embayment with high morphologic, ecological and economic significance to Southeast Queensland, Australia. Transport barriers visualised by the LCS create pathways and barriers for material transport in the embayment. It was found that the wind field modified both the rate attraction and location of the transport barriers. One of the key outcomes is the demonstration of the significant role of islands in partitioning the transport of material and mixing within the embayment. The distribution of the debris sources along the shoreline are explained by the relative location of the LCS to the shoreline. Therefore, extraction of LCS can help to predict sources and fate of anthropogenic marine debris and thus, serve as a useful way for effective management of vulnerable regions and marine protected areas.
We explore the possibility to identify areas of intense patch formation from floating items due to systematic convergence of surface velocity fields by means of a visual comparison of Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) and estimates of areas prone to patch formation using the concept of Finite-Time Compressibility (FTC, a generalisation of the notion of time series of divergence). The LCSs are evaluated using the Finite Time Lyapunov Exponent (FTLE) method. The test area is the Gulf of Finland (GoF) in the Baltic Sea. A basin-wide spatial average of backward FTLE is calculated for the GoF for the first time. This measure of the mixing strength displays a clear seasonal pattern. The evaluated backward FTLE features are linked with potential patch formation regions with high FTC levels. It is shown that areas hosting frequent upwelling or downwelling have consistently stronger than average mixing intensity. The combination of both methods, FTC and LCS, has the potential of being a powerful tool to identify the formation of patches of pollution at the sea surface.
Aims. We show how the build-up of magnetic gradients in the Suns corona may be inferred directly from photospheric velocity data. This enables computation of magnetic connectivity measures such as the squashing factor without recourse to magnetic field extrapolation. Methods.Assuming an ideal evolution in the corona, and an initially uniform magnetic field, the subsequent field line mapping is computed by integrating trajectories of the (time-dependent) horizontal photospheric velocity field. The method is applied to a 12 hour high-resolution sequence of photospheric flows derived from Hinode/SOT magnetograms. Results. We find the generation of a network of quasi-separatrix layers in the magnetic field, which correspond to Lagrangian coherent structures in the photospheric velocity. The visual pattern of these structures arises primarily from the diverging part of the photospheric flow, hiding the effect of the rotational flow component: this is demonstrated by a simple analytical model of photospheric convection. We separate the diverging and rotational components from the observed flow and show qualitative agreement with purely diverging and rotational models respectively. Increasing the flow speeds in the model suggests that our observational results are likely to give a lower bound for the rate at which magnetic gradients are built up by real photospheric flows. Finally, we construct a hypothetical magnetic field with the inferred topology, that can be used for future investigations of reconnection and energy release.
In this paper we describe the construction of an efficient probabilistic parameterization that could be used in a coarse-resolution numerical model in which the variation of moisture is not properly resolved. An Eulerian model using a coarse-grained field on a grid cannot properly resolve regions of saturation---in which condensation occurs---that are smaller than the grid boxes. Thus, in the absence of a parameterization scheme, either the grid box must become saturated or condensation will be underestimated. On the other hand, in a stochastic Lagrangian model of moisture transport, trajectories of parcels tagged with humidity variables are tracked and small-scale moisture variability can be retained; however, explicitly implementing such a scheme in a global model would be computationally prohibitive. One way to introduce subgrid-scale saturation into an Eulerian model is to assume the humidity within a grid box has a probability distribution. To close the problem, this distribution is conventionally determined by relating the required subgrid-scale properties of the flow to the grid-scale properties using a turbulence closure. Here, instead, we determine an assumed probability distribution by using the statistical moments from a stochastic Lagrangian version of the system. The stochastic system is governed by a Fokker--Planck equation and we use that, rather than explicitly following the moisture parcels, to determine the parameters of the assumed distribution. We are thus able to parameterize subgrid-scale condensation in an Eulerian model in a computationally efficient and theoretically well-founded way. In two idealized advection--condensation problems we show that a coarse Eulerian model with the subgrid parameterization is well able to mimic its Lagrangian counterpart.
In this work, we make two improvements on the staggered grid hydrodynamics (SGH) Lagrangian scheme for modeling 2-dimensional compressible multi-material flows on triangular mesh. The first improvement is the construction of a dynamic local remeshing scheme for preventing mesh distortion. The remeshing scheme is similar to many published algorithms except that it introduces some special operations for treating grids around multi-material interfaces. This makes the simulation of extremely deforming and topology-variable multi-material processes possible, such as the complete process of a heavy fluid dipping into a light fluid. The second improvement is the construction of an Euler-like flow on each edge of the mesh to count for the edge-bending effect, so as to mitigate the checkerboard oscillation that commonly exists in Lagrangian simulations, especially the triangular mesh based simulations. Several typical hydrodynamic problems are simulated by the improved staggered grid Lagrangian hydrodynamic method to test its performance.
This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to a crucial error in the formulation.