Scaling of the Reynolds number in turbulent thermal convection.

A riddle in turbulent thermal convection is the apparent dispersion from 0.42 to 0.5 in the value of the scaling exponent of experimentally measured Reynolds number Re approximately Ragamma, where Ra is the Rayleigh number. The measured Re may be divided into two groups: one based on the circulation frequency of the mean wind and the other based on a directly measured velocity. With new experimental results we show that in frequency measurements the dispersion in gamma is a result of the evolution in the circulation path of the wind, and that in the velocity measurements it is caused by the inclusion of a counterflow in the mean velocity. When these factors are properly accounted for both groups give gamma=0.5, which may imply that a single mechanism is driving the flow for both low and high values of Ra.