Vortical structures in rotating uniformly sheared turbulence

Rotating homogeneous turbulence with and without mean uniform shear is investigated numerically. It is found that in the shearless case the two-dimensionalization process is most effective when the initial small-scale Rossby number is around unity and the resonant triad interactions play a central role in the process. The vortical structures are studied systematically by changing the relative strength of the mean shear and the system rotation as well as the sense of rotation. (The system is called cyclonic (or anti-cyclonic) when the direction of the vorticity associated with the rotation is the same as (or opposite to) that of the mean shear.) A distinct coherent structure appears in the anti-cyclonic system when the vorticities associated with the rotation and the mean shear cancel out, i.e. the absolute vorticity of the mean shear vanishes. For the linearly most unstable case in the anticyclonic system, the vortex tubes develop in the sheared direction, which is caused by instability of vortex layers. For linearly stable cases in both the cyclonic and the anti-cyclonic systems, there appear three typical structures, that is, the oblique vortex tubes, the pancake-like structures and the ribbon-like structures. It is interesting that the flow behaves quite differently between the cyclonic and anti-cyclonic systems even at the same Bradshaw number.