Large-scale turbulence is causing new headaches for anxious aviators in a warming atmosphere, but it’s small-scale turbulence that has always made physicists scratch their heads. The cascading process that transfers energy from the biggest eddies down to the tiniest ones causes a turbulent flow at the small scale to retain no memory of the large-scale flow structure. Because of this memory loss, researchers often assume that small-scale turbulence is isotropic. Subharthi Chowdhuri and Tirtha Banerjee of the University of California, Irvine, now introduce a framework for investigating turbulent flows and show that anisotropy persists even at the small scale. Read More