BREAKING WAVES AND GLOBAL-SCALE CHEMICAL-TRANSPORT IN THE EARTHS ATMOSPHERE, WITH SPINOFFS FOR THE SUNS INTERIOR

The atmosphere used to be thought of using classical ideas about turbu lence that looked back to analogies with gas kinetic theory, involving among other things an assumption that departures from spatial homogen eity are weak. This led to problematic notions like 'negative eddy vis cosity'. However, more recent advances in understanding the global-sca le atmospheric circulation have shown the importance of recognizing - as essential, leading-order features - the strong spatial inhomogeneit y of atmospheric turbulence together with the crucial role of wave pro pagation. For this purpose one can usefully draw a rough analogy with an ocean beach, where (a) turbulence in the surf zone owes its existen ce to waves arriving from elsewhere, and where (b) the spatial inhomog eneity of that turbulence is an essential feature of what is called wa ve dissipation by breaking. There is a phase-coherent interaction betw een the waves and the highly inhomogeneous turbulence. One well known consequence is the generation of mean currents along beaches by the co nvergence of the radiation stress or wave-induced momentum transport. For the global atmospheric circulation, the two most important kinds o f waves are internal gravity waves and Rossby or vorticity waves. The chirality of Rossby waves, tied to the sense of the Earth's rotation, results in an angular momentum transport that is intrinsically one-sig ned and therefore ratchet-like, producing via Coriolis effects an inex orable 'gyroscopic pumping' of air systematically poleward that domina tes, for instance, the global-scale transport of chlorofluorocarbons a nd other long-lived greenhouse gases in the stratosphere. The Rossby-w ave counterpart to ocean-beach wave breaking involves not S-dimensiona l but 'layerwise 2-dimensional' turbulence, producing inhomogeneous mi xing, quasi-horizontally along stratification surfaces, of a spin-like material invariant called the Rossby-Ertel potential vorticity. Some of the same considerations apply to the fluid dynamics of the Sun's st ably stratified radiative interior. Together with recent helioseismic data they are forcing us to a nos el conclusion: the Sun not merely ca n, but must, have in its radiative interior a poloidal magnetic field that is strong enough (similar to 1 gauss or 10(-4) tesla by a prelimi nary rough estimate) to reshape, drastically, the circulation and diff erential rotation in the interior. This has far reaching consequences for understanding solar spindown history and internal variability, and for performing helioseismic inversions. It is helping to disentangle magnetic from sound-speed effects in the inversions, and should yield otherwise unobtainable information about differential rotation in the Sun's deepest interior. It suggests a possible new resolution of the l ithium-burning enigma.