Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Shear flow instability is a classical problem in hydrodynamics. In particular, it is important for understanding the transition from laminar to turbulent flow.  First, I will describe some results on shear flow instability in the setting of inviscid flows in a rigid wall. Then the effects of a free surface (or water waves) and viscosity will be discussed.

We consider a random field of tensor product type X and investigate the quality of approximation (both in the average and in the probabilistic sense) to X by the processes of rank n minimizing the quadratic approximation error. Most interesting results are obtained for the case when the dimension of parameter set tends to infinity. Call "cardinality" the minimal n providing a given level of approximation accuracy. By applying Central Limit Theorem to (deterministic) array of covariance eigenvalues, we show that, for any fixed level of relative error, this cardinality increases exponentially (a phenomenon often called "intractability" or "dimension curse") and find the explosion coefficient. We also show that the behavior of the probabilistic and average cardinalities is essentially the same in the large domain of parameters.

* Dr. Trotter: perspective of the hiring committee with an emphasis on research universities. * Dr. Carroll: perspective of the applicant with an emphasis on liberal arts universities. * Dr. Dieci: other advice, including non-academic routes.

The connection between transport barriers and potential vorticity (PV) barriers in PV-conserving flows is investigated with a focus on zonal jets in planetary atmospheres. A perturbed PV-staircase model is used to illustrate important concepts. This flow consists of a sequence of narrow eastward and broad westward zonal jets with a staircase PV structure; the PV-steps are at the latitudes of the cores of the eastward jets. Numerically simulated solutions to the quasigeostrophic PV conservation equation in a perturbed PV-staircase flow are presented. These simulations reveal that both eastward and westward zonal jets serve as robust meridional transport barriers. The surprise is that westward jets, across which the background PV gradient vanishes, serve as robust transport barriers. A theoretical explanation of the underlying barrier mechanism is provided, which relies on recent results relating to the stability of degenerate Hamiltonians under perturbation. It is argued that transport barriers near the cores of westward zonal jets, across which the background PV gradient is small, are found in Jupiter's midlatitude weather layer and in the Earth's summer hemisphere subtropical stratosphere.