James L. Best

An expert review of recent progress in the study of turbulent flows with a focus on recently identified organized structures. This book reviews the recent progress in the study of the turbulent flows that sculpt the Earth’s surface, focusing in particular on the organized structures that have been identified in recent years within turbulent flows. These coherent flow structures can include eddies or vortices at the scale of individual grains, through structures that scale with the flow depth in rivers or estuaries, to the large-scale structure of flows at the morphological or landform scale. These flow structures are of wide interest to the scientific community because they play an important role in fluid dynamics and influence the transport, erosion and deposition of sediment and pollutants in a wide variety of fluid flow environments. Scientific knowledge of these structures has improved greatly over the past 20 years as computational fluid dynamics has come to play an increasing important part in building our understanding of coherent flow structures across a broad range of scales. Chapters comprise a series of major, invited papers and a selection of the most novel, innovative papers presented at the second Coherent Flow Structures Conference held August 3-5, 2011 at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Chapters focus on six major themes: Dynamics of coherent flow structures (CFS) in geophysical flowsInteraction of turbulent flows, vegetation and ecological habitatsCoherent structure of atmospheric flowsNumerical modeling of coherent flow structuresTurbulence in open channel flowsCoherent flow structures, sediment transport and morphological feedbacks.

Coherent Flow Structures in Open Channels presents the first integrated treatment, across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, of the origins and characteristics of coherent fluid motions and their influence on sediment transport and bed morphology. This book contains contributions from an international and interdisciplinary authorship who are responsible for many of the recent advances in geophysical boundary layer research. Coherent flow structures are examined systematically across a range of scales from flat-bed boundary layers, grain and bedform roughness generated structures through to the largest scales, where structures may be associated with bars, meander bends and channel confluences. The book is broadly organized according to the spatial scales of coherent flow structures and presents a treatise on the study of these motions from theoretical, experimental and field-based approaches. These papers describe the origins, evolution and characteristics of coherent flow structures and the control which they may impart on sediment transport, both as a bed and suspended load, and ultimately on channel morphology. The book also highlights future research themes required to advance the interdisciplinary understanding of these complex, yet ubiquitous, natural flows. The research presented here will find applications within many fields, including geomorphology, sedimentology, the physical and numerical modelling of two-phase flows, environmental fluid and sediment dynamics and river engineering.