Data for 'Large-scale flow in a cubic Rayleigh–Bènard cell: Long-term turbulence statistics and Markovianity of macrostate transitions'

We investigate the large-scale circulation (LSC) in a turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection flow in a cubic closed convection cell by means of direct numerical simulations at a Rayleigh number Ra=106. The numerical studies are conducted for a single flow trajectory up to 105 convective free-fall times to obtain a sufficient sampling of the four discrete LSC states, which can be summarized to one macrostate, and the two crossover configurations which are taken in between for short periods. It is found that the statistics and time history depends strongly on the Prandtl number Pr of the working fluid which has values of 0.1, 0.7 and 10. It changes from very rapid switches for the lowest Prandtl number to the spontaneous lock in one of the four states for the whole period for the largest one. Alternatively, we run an ensemble of 3600 short-term direct numerical simulations to study the transition probabilities between the discrete LSC states. This second approach is also used to probe the Markov property of the dynamics. Our ensemble analysis gave strong indication of Markovianity of the transition process from one LSC state to another, even though the data are still accompanied by considerable noise. It is based on the eigenvalue spectrum of the transition probability matrix, further on the distribution of persistence times and the joint distribution of two successive macrostate persistence times.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Mathematical problems in physical fluid dynamics (part 1)’.