Surface quasi-geostrophic turbulence: the refined study of an active scalar

Abstract Surface quasi-geostrophic (SQG) theory describes the two-dimensional active transport of a scalar field, such as temperature, which – when properly rescaled – shares the same physical dimension of length/time as the advecting velocity field. This duality has motivated analogies with fully developed three-dimensional turbulence. In particular, the Kraichnan – Leith – Batchelor similarity theory predicts a Kolmogorov-type inertial range scaling for both scalar and velocity fields, and the presence of intermittency through multifractal scaling was pointed out by Sukhatme & Pierrehumbert (2002 Chaos 12, 439–450), in unforced settings. In this work, we refine the discussion of these statistical analogies, using numerical simulations with up to $16\,384^2$ collocation points in a steady-state regime dominated by the direct cascade of scalar variance. We show that mixed structure functions, coupling velocity increments with scalar differences, develop well-defined scaling ranges, highlighting the role of anomalous fluxes of all the scalar moments. However, the clean multiscaling properties of SQG transport are blurred when considering velocity and scalar fields separately. In particular, the usual (unmixed) structure functions do no follow any power-law scaling in any range of scales, neither for the velocity nor for the scalar increments. This specific form of the intermittency phenomenon reflects the specific kinematic properties of SQG turbulence, involving the interplay between long-range interactions, structures and geometry. Revealing the multiscaling in single-field statistics requires us to resort to generalised notions of scale invariance, such as extended self-similarity and a specific form of refined self-similarity. Our findings emphasise the fundamental entanglement of scalar and velocity fields in SQG turbulence: they evolve hand in hand and any attempt to isolate them destroys scaling in its usual sense. This perspective sheds new lights on the discrepancies in spectra and structure functions that have been repeatedly observed in SQG numerics for the past 20 years.