APPLICABILITY OF MEAN FIELD APPROXIMATION TO NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS OF THERMAL CONVECTION UNDER THE CONDITION OF LAKE BIWA

Abstract

This paper describes the fundamental characteristics of the numerical experiments on thermal convection carried out under the condition of the northern part of Lake Biwa. Since the temporal change of vertical distribution of water temperature during the cooling period can be reproduced by means of a simple simulation model of thermal convection in the previous study, the numerical results of thermal convection simulation was firstly shown under wide range of cooling rates at water surface. We considered to clarify the basic features of these numerical data on thermal convection using a stochastic model and its mean field approximation. It was shown through the comparison of theoretical results to numerical results that the mean field approximation with some refinement is applicable to the numerical experiments to some extent.