| Since the 1950s, Earth-orbiting satellites have regularly observed mesoscale vortex street structures imprinted in marine stratocumulus cloud decks, in maritime envirnoments all around the world. These vortex street structures occupy a large range of spatial scales and are always associated with lower tropospheric flow around bluff mountainous islands. Due to qualitative similarities, atmospheric vortex streets are typically referred to as the amospheric analog of classical low-Reynolds number von Karman vortex streets (VKVSs), which have been long observed in flow around two-dimensional cylinders in laboratory studies. Despite the obvious similarities between the two fluid phenomena, there are several distinct differences. For example, atmospheric VKVSs have an additional non-homogeneous dimension (i.e., the vertical axis), an entirely different formation mechanism, and an enormous Reynolds number difference (i.e., due to viscosity and length scale differences). As a result of these differences, it is unclear whether the dynamical nature of atmospheric VKVSs share the same quantitative character as their classical counterparts.;In this dissertation, a dynamical characterization of atmospheric VKVSs is presented and then compared to long-standing documentation of low-Reynolds number VKVS dynamical properties. Through the use of high-performance numerical modeling of realistic atmospheres, it is found that several of the same dynamical features associated with classical VKVSs can also be found in association with atmospheric VKVSs. These features include vortex street shedding frequency, multiple side-by-side vortex street interaction phasing regimes, and gap-jet behavior between two vortex streets. In developing this dynamical characterization, effective length and time scales are identified and used to specifically catalog certain properties. Based on this, the results presented here support the idea that atmospheric vortex streets do indeed behave as the atmospheric analog of classical von K´arm´an vortex streets. In conjunction with this finding, the results also provide evidence to support quasi-universal similarity relationships which describe vortex streets in a scale-invariant sense.;Building on the results described above, the implications of the identified dynamical nature of atmospheric VKVSs are explored in the context of their impact on the refraction of long-range optical rays. It is found that the realistic vortex shedding associated with bluff islands can result in temporal perturbations of simulated ray heights on the order of tens of meters, at distances around 50 km downstream. Moreover, the dynamical properties outlined in this work may have several other applications in areas such as scalar dispersion and air-sea interaction. |
