Adiabatic and viscous simulations of symmetric instability: structure, evolution, and energetics

Abstract

As a first step, the capability of the model to simulate circulations of the dry inviscid symmetric instability that are in agreement with the linear hydrostatic theory has been verified. This has allowed the design and verification of diagnostic tools. In order to use these diagnostics on simulations of real data cases, a spectral method has been developed to separate the basic state from the symmetric instability circulations. For all of our simulations, the energetics of the circulation show that the circulations draw their kinetic energy mainly from the term linked to the basic vertical shear and the correlation of the vertical and longitudinal components of the motion of the perturbation. -from Author