Our simulation program involves a multi-year effort to address both of these sources of turbulence. The work reported here focuses on shear-layer instability. Communication is carried out with the Cray shmem library. The largest solution reported here required several runs with domains of 720 x 240 x 1440 spectral components. The Reynolds number Re specifies the initial nondimensional shear-layer velocity.
Flow is to the right along the top and to the left along the bottom.
Images of the temperature field with accompanying mean vertical profiles. These regions contribute to the formation of streamwise vortex tubes as convection rolls develop and align with the background shear. These processes play important roles in the transition to turbulence and the cascade to small spatial scales. A depiction of the nest of vortex tubes that results during intense periods of turbulent mixing is shown in Figure 2b. Three orthogonal views of the shear layer are presented with the magnitude of the vorticity scaled between maximum and minimum values.