Wind reversals and non-Oberbeck-Boussinesq effects in Rayleigh-Bénard concvection

Convection, from the Latin convehere (to carry with), is the transport of a physical quantity by coupling with a velocity field. Thermal convection, in particular, is concerned with the interplay between heat, buoyancy, and fluid motion. A classical example is provided by the emissions of warm rising and cold falling fluid in a container heated from below and cooled fromabove. Depending on the strength of the thermal driving, such emissions may even induce a large-scale circulation of fluid. Some basic questions arising in this scenario are: How irregular is the spatiotemporal dynamics of the large-scale circulation? Does it exhibit any trace of long memory? How sensitive is the flow to variations in the intrinsic properties of the fluid? Are such changes capable of breaking the top-down symmetry of the boundary-layers? These questions are addressed in the present thesis.