Anomalous Dissipation and Spontaneous Stochasticity in Deterministic Surface Quasi-Geostrophic Flow

Surface quasi-geostrophy (SQG) describes the two-dimensional active transport of a temperature field in a strongly stratified and rotating environment. Besides its relevance to geophysics, SQG bears formal resemblance with various flows of interest for turbulence studies, from passive scalar and Burgers to incompressible fluids in two and three dimensions. This analogy is here substantiated by considering the turbulent SQG regime emerging from deterministic and smooth initial data prescribed by the superposition of a few Fourier modes. While still unsettled in the inviscid case, the initial value problem is known to be mathematically well-posed when regularised by a small viscosity. In practice, numerics reveal that in the presence of viscosity, a turbulent regime appears in finite time, which features three of the distinctive anomalies usually observed in three-dimensional developed turbulence: (i) dissipative anomaly, (ii) multifractal scaling, and (iii) super-diffusive separation of fluid particles, both backward and forward in time. These three anomalies point towards three spontaneously broken symmetries in the vanishing viscosity limit: scale invariance, time reversal, and uniqueness of the Lagrangian flow, a fascinating phenomenon that Krzysztof Gawȩdzki dubbed spontaneous stochasticity. In the light of Gawȩdzki’s work on the passive scalar problem, we argue that spontaneous stochasticity and irreversibility are intertwined in SQG and provide numerical evidence for this connection. Our numerics, though, reveal that the deterministic SQG setting only features a tempered version of spontaneous stochasticity, characterised in particular by non-universal statistics.