Conditional statistics of temperature fluctuations in turbulent convection

Abstract

We find that the conditional statistics of temperature difference at fixed values of the locally averaged temperature dissipation rate in turbulent convection become Gaussian in the regime where the mixing dynamics is expected to be driven by buoyancy. Hence, intermittency of the temperature fluctuations in this buoyancy-driven regime can be solely attributed to the variation of the locally averaged temperature dissipation rate. We further obtain the functional behavior of these conditional temperature structure functions. This functional form demonstrates explicitly the failure of dimensional agruments and enhances the understanding of the temperature structure functions.