Waving plants and turbulent eddies

Abstract

New large-eddy simulations of flow over a flexible plant canopy by Dupont et al. (J. Fluid Mech., 2010, this issue, vol. 652, pp. 5–44) have produced apparently paradoxical results. Work over the last three decades had suggested that turbulent eddies could ‘lock onto’ to the waving frequency of uniform cereal canopies. Their new simulations contradict this view, although a resolution may lie in the essentially three-dimensional nature of the instability process that generates the dominant eddies above plant canopies.