Effective eddy viscosities in implicit modeling of decaying high Reynolds number turbulence with and without rotation

Abstract

We assess the applicability of the numerical dissipation as an implicit turbulence model. The nonoscillatory finite volume numerical scheme MPDATA developed for simulations of geophysical flows is employed as an example of a scheme with an implicit turbulence model. A series of low resolution simulations of decaying homogeneous turbulence with and without Coriolis forces in the limit of zero molecular viscosity are performed. To assess the implicit model the long-time evolution of turbulence in the simulations is investigated and the numerical velocity fields are analyzed to determine the effective spectral eddy viscosity that is attributed to the numerical discretization. The detailed qualitative and quantitative comparisons are made between the numerical eddy viscosity and the theoretical results as well as the intrinsic eddy viscosity computed exactly from the velocity fields by introducing an artificial wave number cutoff. We find that the numerical dissipation depends on the time step and exhibits contradictory dependence on rotation: it is overestimated for rapid rotation cases and is underestimated for nonrotating cases. These results indicate that the numerical dissipation may fail to represent the effects of the physical subgrid scale processes unless the parameters of a numerical scheme are carefully chosen.