Coherent Flow Structures at Earth's Surface

An expert review of recent progress in the study of turbulentflows with a focus on recently identified organizedstructures. This book reviews the recent progress in the study of the turbulentflows that sculpt the Earth's surface, focusing inparticular on the organized structures that have been identified inrecent years within turbulent flows. These coherent flowstructures can include eddies or vortices at the scale ofindividual grains, through structures that scale with the flowdepth in rivers or estuaries, to the large-scale structure of flowsat the morphological or landform scale. These flow structuresare of wide interest to the scientific community because they playan important role in fluid dynamics and influence thetransport, erosion and deposition of sediment andpollutants in a wide variety of fluid flowenvironments. Scientific knowledge of these structures has improved greatlyover the past 20 years as computational fluid dynamics hascome to play an increasing important part in building ourunderstanding of coherent flow structures across a broad rangeof scales. Chapters comprise a series of major, invited papers and aselection of the most novel, innovative papers presented atthe second Coherent Flow Structures Conference held August 3-5,2011 at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BritishColumbia. Chapters focus on six major themes: * Dynamics of coherent flow structures (CFS) in geophysicalflows * Interaction of turbulent flows, vegetation and ecologicalhabitats * Coherent structure of atmospheric flows * Numerical modeling of coherent flow structures * Turbulence in open channel flows * Coherent flow structures, sediment transport and morphologicalfeedbacks.