Abstract
The standard design for the direct numerical simulation of homogeneous stably-stratified turbulence assumes that the simulated turbulence is fully characterised by the gradient Richardson number. This assumption is justified only in sufficiently strong stratification when the Obukhov turbulent length scale, L, is essentially smaller than the depth of the computational domain, H. Otherwise simulations are not quite realistic because they cut off the large-scale part of the turbulence spectrum, namely, the scales comparable with or larger than H but smaller than L, that is just the eddies most sensitive to the stratification.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the EC FP7 projects ERC PBL-PMES (No. 227915) and MEGAPOLI (No. 212520). The author thanks Antti Hellsten and Igor Esau for discussions.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Zilitinkevich, S.S. Comments on the Numerical Simulation of Homogeneous Stably-Stratified Turbulence. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 136, 161–164 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-010-9484-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-010-9484-1