Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, October 27th - 3:00 PM

"Rapidly Rotating Rayleigh-Bénard Convection: The Quest for Quasi-Geostrophy"

The nature of thermal convection changes dramatically with the addition of rapid rotation.  Convective structures change from rolls to vortices, the spacing between structures shrinks dramatically, and the nature of boundary layers changes from shear layers (laminar or turbulent) to Ekman layers with associated Ekman pumping.  The last decade has been an exciting one for this topic as experiment, theory, and direct numerical simulation have made significant contributions in elucidating the state of thermal convection under rapid rotation.  I will present some history and context regarding the study of rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection, summarize the progress of the last decade, and conclude with recent results and challenging opportunities for this iconic hydrodynamic problem.

Dr. Robert Ecke

Fellow

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Robert Ecke is a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Washington in 1982, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on cryogenic thermal convection involving hydrodynamic stability, dynamical systems, and chaos. As a Technical Staff Member, he continued research on rotating thermal convection and pattern formation, material dissolution and compositional convection, turbulent boundary layers and heat- transport scaling, spatio-temporal dynamics in pattern forming systems, 2D turbulence, turbulence in stratified flows, statics/dynamics of granular materials including an experimental earthquake analog system, and mass transport via fluid flow in porous media. He was Director of the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2004-2015 where he guided research on interdisciplinary science including quantitative biology, information science and technology, quantum information science, and non-equilibrium statistical physics. 

Ecke won the Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellows Prize in 1991 for his work on nonlinear dynamics and chaos and is an elected Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research interests include rapidly rotating thermal convection, turbulence in atmospheres and oceans, fundamental studies of turbulence, properties of granular materials, and fluid mass transport in porous media.