View article

Motivated in part by the problem of large-scale lateral turbulent heat transport in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans, and in part by the problem of turbulent transport itself, we seek to better understand the transport of a passive tracer advected by various types of fully developed two-dimensional turbulence. The types of turbulence considered correspond to various relationships between the streamfunction and the advected field. Each type of turbulence considered possesses two quadratic invariants and each can develop an inverse cascade. These cascades can be modified or halted, for example, by friction, a background vorticity gradient or a mean temperature gradient. We focus on three physically realizable cases: classical two-dimensional turbulence, surface quasi-geostrophic turbulence, and shallow-water quasi-geostrophic turbulence at scales large compared to the radius of deformation. In each model we …