Self-organized criticality of turbulence in strongly stratified mixing layers
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jats:pMotivated by the importance of stratified shear flows in geophysical and environmental circumstances, we characterize their energetics, mixing and spectral behaviour through a series of direct numerical simulations of turbulence generated by Holmboe wave instability (HWI) under various initial conditions. We focus on circumstances where the stratification is sufficiently ‘strong’ so that HWI is the dominant primary instability of the flow. Our numerical findings demonstrate the emergence of self-organized criticality (SOC) that is manifest as an adjustment of an appropriately defined gradient Richardson number, jats:inline-formulajats:alternatives<jats:inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" mime-subtype="gif" xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="S002211201800695X_inline1" />jats:tex-math
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1469-7645