Warwick Turbulence Symposium Workshop on Environmental and Geophysical Turbulence: new approaches in theoretical and numerical modeling                                                  March 13-18, 2006. Joint with EPSRC Platform grant on Turbulence. Organisers: Ian Castro (Southampton), Darryl Holm (ICL), Bob Kerr (Warwick), Sergey Nazarenko (Warwick) and Christos Vassilicos (ICL)

Geophysical and environmental turbulence is of huge importance for weather forecasting and climate modelling, aviation and sea navigation, prediction of natural hazards, etc. This area has experienced significant growth and advances over the last decade thanks to improved understanding of the underlying processes and to the increased computational power available.

However, the predictive power of operational forecasting remains far from perfect because even the most powerful supercomputers cannot resolve the important small-scale processes in turbulence on an operational basis. Even the most optimistic extrapolations of computer development do not leave any hope that this problem will be solved soon just by direct increase in computational power. Thus, we should aim at finding better models of the unresolved (subgrid) scales. Further, much work remains to be done in establishing the role of waves in the small-scale dynamics of atmospheric and oceanic turbulence, studying the mechanisms responsible for air-sea exchanges (momentum, gas, sea spray and moisture), formation of rain clouds and the rain dynamics. Another important question to study is how underwater turbulence interacts with the free surface motions. These processes affect, for example, the spreading of oil slicks and the mixing of CO2 and oxygen to deeper layers in sea-water. Finally, we mention boundary layer turbulence as a classical example important in both atmospheric science and industrial fluid dynamics. This workshop will discuss recent progress in the above fields and will particularly encourage interaction between theoreticians and researchers involved with practical applications including experimentalists.