Influence of inlet and bulk noise on Rayleigh-Bénard convection with lateral flow.

Spatiotemporal properties of convective fluctuations and of their correlations are investigated theoretically in the vicinity of the threshold for onset of convection in the presence of a lateral through-flow using the full linearized equations of fluctuating hydrodynamics. The effect of external forcing by inlet boundary conditions on the downstream evolution of convective fields is separated from the effect of internal bulk thermal forcing with the use of spatial Laplace transformations. They show how the spatial variation of fluctuations and of their correlations are governed by the six spatial characteristic exponents of the field equations.