Dust Devil Dynamics

A self-consistent hydrodynamic model for the onset of a dust devil vortex is derived and analyzed. The horizontal toroidal flow and vertical velocity field are driven by the vertical temperature gradient instability of gravity waves. The critical temperature gradient is derived and the associated eigenmodes for simple models are given. The nonlinear dynamics in the vertical/horizontal flows drive the toroidal flow through a parametric decay process. Methods developed for triboelectric charging of dust are used to compute the electric polarization vector from the charging of the sand particles. Elementary comparisons are made with the data from dust devil observations and research and simulations by Farrell et al. 2004, 2006. The parameters for a proposed Dust Devil laboratory experiment at Aix-Marseille University are presented. Following R. L. Miller et al. JGR 2006 estimates are made of the overall contribution to the mid-latitude aerosol layer in the atmosphere that acts to moderate global climate temperature increases through a negative feedback loop. The problem has an analog in terms of the heating of the boron or beryllium coated steel vacuum vessel walls in tokamaks where the core plasma plays the role of the sun and has a temperature (~ 10keV ) that exceeds that of the core of the sun.