Introductory Remarks

Abstract

Buoyancy, rotation, and curvature effects are important in many of the turbulent flows found in engineering and in geophysics. Earlier in this century, as the need developed for better turbulence prediction tools in engineering design, researchers turned to geometrically simple shear flows to study turbulence mechanics in its barest form. Today, while the goal of understanding the physics of even these simplest flows is still unrealized, our ability to cope with turbulence in applications has markedly improved. These six papers signal that clearly in their direct approaches to the complicating effects of buoyancy, rotation, and curvature.