Turbulent transport of momentum, heat and matter dominates many of the fluid flows found in physics, engineering and the environmental sciences. Complicated unsteady motions which mayor may not count as turbulence are found in interstellar dust clouds and in the larger blood vessels. The fascination of this nonlinear, irreversible stochastic process for pure scientists is demonstrated by the contributions made to its understanding by several of the most distinguished mathematical physicists of this century, and its importance to engineers is evident from the wide variety of industries which have contributed to, or benefit from, our current knowledge. Several books on turbulence have appeared in recent years. Taken collectively, they illustrate the depth of the subject, from basic principles accessible to undergraduates to elaborate mathematical solutions representing many years of work, but there is no one account which emphasizes its breadth. For this, a multi-author work is necessary. This book is an introduction to our state of knowledge of turbulence in most of the branches of science which have contributed to that knowledge. It is not a Markovian sequence of unrelated essays, and we have not simply assembled specialized accounts of turbulence problems in each branch; this book is a unified treatment, with the material classified according to phenomena rather than application, and freed as far as possible from discipline-oriented detail. The approach is "applied" rather than "pure" with the aim of helping people who need to under stand or predict turbulence in real life.
