Fluid Mechanics of Planets and Stars
Understanding the dynamics of planetary and stellar fluid layers, including the atmosphere and oceans of the Earth and other planets, iron cores, and stellar convective and radiative zones, remains a tremendous interdisciplinary challenge, relying on common knowledge in fundamental fluid mechanics. A few of the numerous open questions include:
- What are the basic physical mechanisms responsible for climate circulation, and how can they be parameterised to reliably predict global climate change?
- What are the prevalent force balances and physical mechanisms behind natural large-scale features such as Jupiter's Great Red Spot, polar clusters, and bands?
- What are the relevant driving forces and flow regimes in conducting planetary cores for explaining the generation of large-scale magnetic fields by dynamo action?
- How are the various types of waves propagating in the oceans, atmospheres, cores and stellar interiors generated, and what influence do they have on the dynamics?
Interdisciplinary research in geo- and astrophysical fluid dynamics is also intrinsically multi-method. Indeed, the main obstacle to quantitative modeling and understanding of planetary and stellar flows stands in the extreme character of the involved dimensionless parameters. Relevant studies thus rely on the principle of dynamical similitude and scaling laws, sustained by theory, experiments and numerical simulations.
Much research effort has been devoted to understanding planetary and stellar flows within the various communities of Mechanics, Applied Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, Planetary, Atmospheric and Earth Sciences, Oceanography, and Astrophysics. But progress has mostly been confined to each separate domain, with only marginal cross-fertilisation. The objective of this school is to go beyond this state, by providing participants with a global introduction and an up-to-date overview of all relevant studies, fully addressing the wide range of involved disciplines and methods.
The course will be organized in three parts. The first will focus on fundamental aspects of fluid mechanics in geo- and astrophysical flows, including introductory material as well as current cutting-edge research, with a focus on instabilities, turbulence, and waves. The second part will focus on concrete applications to topical problems, with lectures focusing on planetary interiors, atmospheres, and oceans. Finally, the third part will involve practical numerical sessions using the open-source solver Dedalus (http://dedalus-project.org). Participants will learn to set up and run numerical simulations on their laptops related to problems discussed in the lectures.
The targeted audience for this school is PhD students, postdocs, and young researchers, working in departments of Mechanics, Applied Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, Planetary, Atmospheric and Earth Sciences, Oceanography, and Astrophysics. A background in fluid dynamics will be assumed for each participant, but no specific knowledge in application domains or computational methods will be requested. Each participant will present her/his work during a flash talk, followed by a poster session.