Direct Numerical Simulation of an atmospheric-like differentially heated rotating annulus

Using high-order discretization on a High-Performance Computing framework, direct numerical simulations of a differentially heated rotating annulus are performed. The geometry of the baroclinic wave tank is similar to the new atmospheric-like experiment designed at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg (Rodda et al., 2020), which also consists of a differentially heated rotating annulus. The experimental observations reveal  spontaneous emissions of inertial-gravity waves in the baroclinic wave jet front in accordance with Hien et al. (2018). The different length scales of inertial-gravity instabilities and the baroclinic waves make direct numerical simulation challenging. This motivates the current design of a new higher-order/HPC solver devoted to stratified rotating flows (Abide et al., 2018). Specifically, some features of compact scheme discretizations are used to combine efficiently parallel computing and accuracy for reducing DNS wall times. The ability to reproduce experimentally measured flow regimes with non-axisymmetric regular steady waves to the vacillation regimes is also discussed.

S. Abide et al. (2018), Comput Fluids 174:300-310.
S. Hien et al. (2018), J Fluid Mech 838:5–41.
C. Rodda et al. (2020), Exp Fluids 61:2.