Estimates on enstrophy, palinstrophy, and invariant measures for 2-D turbulence

We construct semi-integral curves which bound the projection of the global attractor of the 2-D Navier–Stokes equations in the plane spanned by enstrophy and palinstrophy. Of particular interest are certain regions of the plane where palinstrophy dominates enstrophy. Previous work shows that if solutions on the global attractor spend a significant amount of time in such a region, then there is a cascade of enstrophy to smaller length scales, one of the main features of 2-D turbulence theory. The semi-integral curves divide the plane into regions having limited ranges for the direction of the flow. This allows us to estimate the average time it would take for an intermittent solution to burst into a region of large palinstrophy. We also derive a sharp, universal upper bound on the average palinstrophy and show that it is achieved only for forces that admit statistical steady states where the nonlinear term is zero.