The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

1378 / 2024-09-25 22:33:03

Kolmogorov's cyclone

Kolmogorov,cyclone

Owing to global warming, tropical cyclones, which rank among the Earth's most powerful atmospheric storms, are becoming more frequent and causing increasing destruction. However, predicting the trajectory of a strong cyclone remains difficult due to the significant interaction between the cyclone and the local topography at the bottom of the marine-atmospheric boundary layer, especially considering turbulence. In 1941, Kolmogorov introduced his groundbreaking work on three-dimensional turbulence to greatly enhance the understanding of this ubiquitous phenomenon in our daily life. One might wonder if his theory still holds true for cyclones. By examining the historical tropical cyclones' Lagrangian trajectories, we show for the first time that Kolmogorov's 1/3 scaling law consistently applies across nearly three orders of spatial scales, specifically, 50< r< 3,000 km, from the mesoscale to the synoptic scale, indicating that the over 80 years old Kolmogorov's 1941 turbulence theory remains a valuable framework for better understanding tropical cyclones.