Coherent Flow Structures at Earth’s Surface

An expert review of recent progress in the study of turbulent flows with a focus on recently identified organized structures. This book reviews the recent progress in the study of the turbulent flows that sculpt the Earth’s surface, focusing in particular on the organized structures that have been identified in recent years within turbulent flows. These coherent flow structures can include eddies or vortices at the scale of individual grains, through structures that scale with the flow depth in rivers or estuaries, to the large-scale structure of flows at the morphological or landform scale. These flow structures are of wide interest to the scientific community because they play an important role in fluid dynamics and influence the transport, erosion and deposition of sediment and pollutants in a wide variety of fluid flow environments. Scientific knowledge of these structures has improved greatly over the past 20 years as computational fluid dynamics has come to play an increasing important part in building our understanding of coherent flow structures across a broad range of scales. Chapters comprise a series of major, invited papers and a selection of the most novel, innovative papers presented at the second Coherent Flow Structures Conference held August 3-5, 2011 at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Chapters focus on six major themes: Dynamics of coherent flow structures (CFS) in geophysical flows Interaction of turbulent flows, vegetation and ecological habitats Coherent structure of atmospheric flows Numerical modeling of coherent flow structures Turbulence in open channel flows Coherent flow structures, sediment transport and morphological feedbacks.