Statistics and scaling in turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection

This Brief addresses two issues of interest of turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection. The first issue is the characterization and understanding of the statistics of the velocity and temperature fluctuations in the system. The second issue is the revelation and understanding of the nature of the scaling behavior of the velocity temperature structure functions. The problem under the Oberbeck-Boussinesq approximation is formulated. The statistical tools, including probability density functions (PDF) and conditional statistics, for studying fluctuations are introduced, and implicit PDF formulae fo