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Boundary-Friction Saturation of Penetrating Large-Scale Vortices

The mechanism that fixes the natural size of a rotating-convection large-scale vortex sitting beneath a stably stratified layer. The vortex is a depth-invariant cylinder in the turbulent layer and a thermal-wind half dome in the stratified layer; when the dome reaches a no-slip boundary, friction saturates growth, and the aspect ratio scales as f/N times the square root of the Rossby number, giving a maximum radius set by the stratified layer depth rather than by the size of the simulation box.