The Atmospheric Wave–Turbulence Jigsaw

It was a huge honour to be asked to give the Marshall Rosenbluth Memorial Lecture. Having never worked on plasma physics, though, I also feel some diffidence! The closest I’ve ever come has been involvement in some peculiar MHD problems that promise an improved understanding of the solar tachocline — more about confining a magnetic field within a plasma than a plasma within a magnetic field. Before proceeding I want to thank Drs Laurène Jouve and Chris McDevitt for producing the first draft of this chapter following my lecture. Chris also kindly lent assistance with the source files and graphics. However, the final responsibility for this chapter and any errors it may contain is mine alone. What I do know about is the kind of fluid dynamics that has helped us to understand the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. We still have an enormous phase space, albeit with fewer degrees of freedom than for plasma physics. Thanks to countless observations and to the peculiarities of flow heavily constrained by Coriolis effects and stable density stratification, great progress has been made in penetrating the nonlinear dynamics. Indeed, and quite surprisingly, researchers into atmosphere–ocean dynamics have gained insight in a way that cuts straight to strong nonlinearity, avoiding the standard paradigms. And an even greater surprise, to me at least, has been what Pat Diamond, Paul Terry and others have been saying in recent years, namely that some insights from atmosphere–ocean dynamics are rel-