Palinstrophy is the curl of the vorticity. It is defined as where is the vorticity.

Palinstrophy is mainly used in turbulence study, where there is a need to quantify how vorticity is transferred from one direction to the others. It is closely related to enstrophy, the latter being more equivalent to the "power" of vorticity.


This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Palinstrophy, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.