Abstract: Recently, a new theoretical and conceptual model of quasigeostrophic turbulence has been advanced in which eddy variance is regarded as being maintained by transient growth of perturbations arising from sources including ...

Abstract: The physical mechanisms of transient amplification of initial perturbations to the thermohaline circulation (THC), and of the optimal stochastic forcing of THC variability, are discussed using a simple meridional box model. ...

Abstract: Theoretical understanding of the growth of wind-driven surface water waves has been based on two distinct mechanisms: growth due to random atmospheric pressure fluctuations unrelated to wave amplitude and growth due to ...

Abstract: Methods for approximating a stable linear autonomous dynamical system by a system of lower order are examined. Reducing the order of a dynamical system is useful theoretically in identifying the irreducible dimension of ...

Abstract: Turbulent fluids are frequently observed to spontaneously self-organize into large spatial-scale jets; geophysical examples of this phenomenon include the Jovian banded winds and the earth?s polar-front jet. These relatively ...

Abstract: The problem of growth of small perturbations in fluid flow and the related problem of maintenance of perturbation variance has traditionally been studied by appeal to exponential modal instability of the flow. In the event ...

Abstract: Transient development of perturbations in inviscid stratified shear flow is investigated. Use is made of closed form analytic solutions that allow concise identification of optimally growing plane-wave solutions for the ...

Abstract: The maintenance of variance and attendant heat flux in linear, forced, dissipative baroclinic shear flows subject to stochastic excitation is examined. The baroclinic problem is intrinsically nonnormal and its stochastic ...

Abstract: An extension of classical stability theory to address the stability of perturbations to time-dependent systems is described. Nonnormality is found to play a central role in determining the stability of systems governed by ...

Abstract: Classical stability theory is extended to include transient growth processes. The central role of the nonnormality of the linearized dynamical system in the stability problem is emphasized, and a generalized stability ...