The growth of the gradient of a scalar temperature in a quasigeostrophic flow is studied numerically in detail. We use a flow evolving from a simple initial condition which was regarded by Constantin &etal; as a candidate for a singularity formation in a finite time. For the inviscid problem, we propose a completely different interpretation of the growth, that is, the temperature gradient can be fitted equally well by a double-exponential function of time rather than an algebraic blowup. It seems impossible to distinguish whether the flow blows up or not on the basis of the inviscid computations at hand. In the viscous case, a comparison is made between a series of computations with different Reynolds numbers. The critical time at which the temperature gradient attains the first local maximum is found to depend double logarithmically on the Reynolds number, which suggests the global regularity of the inviscid flow. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.