Solar wind fluctuations: Not your grandmother's turbulence

2013 
For a while it seemed like a simple fluid-like, self-similar, Kolomogoroff cascade was the easy explanation for the nature and evolution of the majority of solar wind fluctuations. More recently we have found that the cascade is not driven by stirring at large scales; the velocity and magnetic spectra evolve differently with different "inertial ranges" in both slope (until far from the Sun) and wavenumber range (everywhere); anisotropy in both variances and spectral characteristics are the order of the day and are strongly scale dependent; and it is not clear what fraction of the fluctuations should be considered to be turbulent as opposed to, for example, convected structures. This paper gives a brief history and reviews some recent results in these areas.
    • Correction
    • Source
    • Cite
    • Save
    • Machine Reading By IdeaReader
    0
    References
    0
    Citations
    NaN
    KQI
    []