  Freely decaying two-dimensional Navier--Stokes turbulence is studied. The
conservation of vorticity by advective nonlinearities renders a class of
Casimirs that decays under viscous effects. A rigorous constraint on the
palinstrophy production by nonlinear transfer is derived, and an upper bound
for the enstrophy dissipation is obtained. This bound depends only on the
decaying Casimirs, thus allowing the enstrophy dissipation to be bounded from
above in terms of initial data of the flows. An upper bound for the enstrophy
dissipation wavenumber is derived and the new result is compared with the
classical dissipation wavenumber.
