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Core Turbulence

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Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism

Introduction

Turbulence is a ubiquitous feature of geophysical flows. The challenge in dealing with turbulence is the broad range of spatial and temporal scales. For the Earth's core, the largest scales of motion are set by the geometry of the core, whereas the smallest dissipative scales are determined by the low viscosity and chemical diffusivity of liquid iron alloys (Dobson, 2000; Vocadlo et al., 2000). The range of time scales is even greater (Hollerbach, 2003). Buoyancy‐driven inertial oscillations have diurnal periods (Zhang, 1994), whereas changes in the frequency of magnetic reversals occur on time scales of 108 years (McFadden and Merrill, 2000). Such a vast range of spatial and temporal scales prohibits direct simulations of the Earth's geodynamo (q.v.). Instead, modelers must confine their attention to the largest scales and deal with the problem of limited spatial resolution by parameterizing processes that operate at subgrid scales. Spatially constant eddy diffusivities...

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Authors
  1. Bruce Buffett
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  2. Hiroaki Matsui
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leeds,  ,  

    David Gubbins

  2. University of Hawaii,  ,  

    Emilio Herrero-Bervera

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag

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Buffett, B., Matsui, H. (2007). Core Turbulence. In: Gubbins, D., Herrero-Bervera, E. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4423-6_41

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