Self-organized criticality of turbulence in strongly stratified mixing layers

Abstract

Motivated by the importance of stratified shear flows in geophysical and environmental circumstances, we characterize their energetics, mixing and spectral behaviour through a series of direct numerical simulations of turbulence generated by Holmboe wave instability (HWI) under various initial conditions. We focus on circumstances where the stratification is sufficiently ‘strong’ so that HWI is the dominant primary instability of the flow. Our numerical findings demonstrate the emergence of self-organized criticality (SOC) that is manifest as an adjustment of an appropriately defined gradient Richardson number, $Ri_{g}$, associated with the horizontally averaged mean flow, in such a way that it is continuously attracted towards a critical value of $Ri_{g}\sim 1/4$. This self-organization occurs through a continuously reinforced localization of the ‘scouring’ motions (i.e. ‘avalanches’) that are characteristic of the turbulence induced by the breakdown of Holmboe wave instabilities and are developed on the upper and lower flanks of the sharply localized density interface, embedded within a much more diffuse shear layer. These localized ‘avalanches’ are also found to exhibit the expected scale-invariant characteristics. From an energetics perspective, the emergence of SOC is expressed in the form of a long-lived turbulent flow that remains in a ‘quasi-equilibrium’ state for an extended period of time. Most importantly, the irreversible mixing that results from such self-organized behaviour appears to be characterized generically by a universal cumulative turbulent flux coefficient of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{c}\sim 0.2$ only for turbulent flows engendered by Holmboe wave instability. The existence of this self-organized critical state corroborates the original physical arguments associated with self-regulation of stratified turbulent flows as involving a ‘kind of equilibrium’ as described by Turner (1973, Buoyancy Effects in Fluids, Cambridge University Press).