GAFD Seminar: Takeshi Matsumoto (Kyoto University)

Stylized turbulent swirls depicted in artworks are often analyzed with the modern tools for real turbulent flows such as the power spectral density (energy spectrum) and the structure function of their luminance. Motivated by the recent study on "The Starry Night" of van Gogh [Ma et al., Phys. Fluids, 36 095140 (2024)], we here analyze a 18th century Japanese artwork, "Red and White Plum Blossoms" by Ogata Korin, in particular its swirling pattern and the bark of the plum-tree trunk. The results show that they follow closely the Obukhov–Corrsin spectrum in the inertial-convective range of the passive scalar advected by the homogeneous and isotropic turbulence. Furthermore, their fourth- and sixth-order structure functions exhibit approximately the same intermittent scaling law of the passive scalar. We discuss several possible explanations of this consistency.