No Arabic abstract
In a recent paper Rousseau-Rizzi and Emanuel (2019) presented a derivation of an upper limit on maximum hurricane velocity at the surface. This derivation was based on a consideration of an infinitely narrow (differential) Carnot cycle with the warmer isotherm at the point of the maximum wind velocity. Here we show that this derivation neglected a significant term describing the kinetic energy change in the outflow. Additionally, we highlight the importance of a proper accounting for the power needed to lift liquid water. Finally, we provide a revision to the formula for surface fluxes of heat and momentum showing that, if we accept the assumptions adopted by Rousseau-Rizzi and Emanuel (2019), the resulting velocity estimate does not depend on the flux of sensible heat.
A careful reading of old articles puts Olivier Pauluis criticisms concerning the definition of isentropic processes in terms of a potential temperature closely associated with the entropy of moist air, together with the third principle of thermodynamics, into perspective.
This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to a crucial error in the formulation.
Ocean swell plays an important role in the transport of energy across the ocean, yet its evolution is still not well understood. In the late 1960s, the nonlinear Schr{o}dinger (NLS) equation was derived as a model for the propagation of ocean swell over large distances. More recently, a number of dissipative generalizations of the NLS equation based on a simple dissipation assumption have been proposed. These models have been shown to accurately model wave evolution in the laboratory setting, but their validity in modeling ocean swell has not previously been examined. We study the efficacy of the NLS equation and four of its generalizations in modeling the evolution of swell in the ocean. The dissipative generalizations perform significantly better than conservative models and are overall reasonable models for swell amplitudes, indicating dissipation is an important physical effect in ocean swell evolution. The nonlinear models did not out-perform their linearizations, indicating linear models may be sufficient in modeling ocean swell evolution.
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.
The multifractal theory of turbulence is used to investigate the energy cascade in the Northwestern Atlantic ocean. The statistics of singularity exponents of velocity gradients computed from in situ measurements are used to show that the anomalous scaling of the velocity structure functions at depths between 50 ad 500 m has a linear dependence on the exponent characterizing the strongest velocity gradient, with a slope that decreases with depth. Since the distribution of exponents is asymmetric about the mode at all depths, we use an infinitely divisible asymmetric model of the energy cascade, the log-Poisson model, to derive the functional dependence of the anomalous scaling with dissipation. Using this model we can interpret the vertical change of the linear slope as a change in the energy cascade.