Equilibria and condensates in Rossby and drift wave turbulence

Abstract We study the thermodynamic equilibrium spectra of the Charney–Hasegawa–Mima (CHM) equation in its weakly nonlinear limit. In this limit, the equation has three adiabatic invariants, in contrast to the two invariants of the 2D Euler or Gross–Pitaevskii equations, which are examples for comparison. We explore how the third invariant considerably enriches the variety of equilibrium spectra that the CHM system can access. In particular we characterise the singular limits of these spectra in which condensates occur, i.e. a single Fourier mode (or pair of modes) accumulate(s) a macroscopic fraction of the total invariants. We show that these equilibrium condensates provide a simple explanation for the characteristic structures observed in CHM systems of finite size: highly anisotropic zonal flows, large-scale isotropic vortices, and vortices at small scale. We show how these condensates are associated with combinations of negative thermodynamic potentials (e.g. temperature).