3. FULLY TURBULENT REGIMES

The overarching goal of this task is to explore the highest turbulent regimes that are presently accessible from different perspectives

• Forced stratified and rotating turbulence involving a collection of vortices, through either Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) (task 3.1) or through laboratory experiments on the Coriolis platform (task 3.2)
• Free decay of a coherent structure which characteristics correspond to an oceanic anticyclonic lens (task 3.3) through very high resolution numerical simulations.

These different setups imply different distributions of Rossby number as well as different aspect ratios of vortices through the imposed background scaling by f/N, where f is the Coriolis parameter and N is the Brunt- Väisälä frequency. The possibility of close encounter of vortices that can promote regions of strong lateral strain naturally exists in tasks 1 and 2, while the emphasis on very high vertical resolution in task 3 should shed light on the effects of vertical strain near the upper and lower boundaries of the vortex. The overlapping regions of parameter space of the three subtasks should allow for an insightful intercomparison of dissipation rates obtained in each case.