Peter Haynes: Research

Transport, Stirring and Mixing

The transport, stirring and mixing of tracers is relevant to many applications of fluid dynamics and exploits much interesting mathematics. I am interested in some fundamental aspects of transport, stirring and mixing, as well as implications for atmospheric chemistry and oceanic biology.

Tzella, A. and P. H. Haynes, 2009: The role of a delay time in the spatial structure of chaotically advected reactive scalars. Phys. Fluids, 21, 087101 (21 pages).

Tzella, A., and Haynes, P.H., 2007: Small-scale spatial structure in plankton distributions. Biogeosciences 4(2), 173-179.

Haynes, P.H., Vanneste, J., 2005: What controls the decay of passive scalars in smooth flows? Phys. Fluids, 17, 097103.

Troposphere-Stratosphere coupling

There is much current interest on how changes to the stratosphere might affect the tropospheric circulation, or how prediction of changes to the tropospheric circulation might be limited by poor representation of the stratosphere in models. I have been investigating how dynamical sensitivity of the stratospheric circulation might allow changes imposed in the middle and upper stratosphere to penetrate downwards to the lower stratosphere and troposphere, and also how best to make quantitative predictions of the change in tropospheric circulation resulting from imposed perturbations (to the stratosphere or within the troposphere itself).

Cooper, F. C., Haynes, P. H., 2011: Climate sensitivity via a non-parametric fluctuation-dissipation theorem. J. Atmos. Sci. (in press).

Hardiman, S. C., and P. H. Haynes, 2008: Dynamical sensitivity of the stratospheric circulation and downward influence of upper level perturbations, J. Geophys. Res., 113, D23103, doi:10.1029/2008JD010168.