The interactions of the elliptical instability and convection

Abstract

The elliptical instability is an instability of elliptical streamlines, which can be excited by large-scale tidal flows in rotating fluid bodies, and excites inertial waves if the dimensionless tidal amplitude ($\epsilon$) is sufficiently large. It operates in convection zones but its interactions with turbulent convection have not been studied in this context. We perform an extensive suite of Cartesian hydrodynamical simulations in wide boxes to explore the interactions of the elliptical instability and Rayleigh-B\'enard convection. We find that geostrophic vortices generated by the elliptical instability dominate the flow, with energies far exceeding those of the inertial waves. Furthermore, we find that the elliptical instability can operate with convection, but it is suppressed for sufficiently strong convection, primarily by convectively-driven large-scale vortices. We examine the flow in Fourier space, allowing us to determine the energetically dominant frequencies and wavenumbers. We find that power primarily concentrates in geostrophic vortices, in wavenumbers that are convectively unstable, and along the inertial wave dispersion relation, even in non-elliptically deformed convective flows. Examining linear growth rates on a convective background, we find that convective large-scale vortices suppress the elliptical instability in the same way as the geostrophic vortices created by the elliptical instability itself. Finally, convective motions act as an effective viscosity on large-scale tidal flows, providing a sustained energy transfer (scaling as $\epsilon^2$). Furthermore, we find that the energy transfer resulting from bursts of elliptical instability, when it operates, is consistent with the $\epsilon^3$ scaling found in prior work.