8,429 research outputs found
Climate dynamics and fluid mechanics: Natural variability and related uncertainties
The purpose of this review-and-research paper is twofold: (i) to review the
role played in climate dynamics by fluid-dynamical models; and (ii) to
contribute to the understanding and reduction of the uncertainties in future
climate-change projections. To illustrate the first point, we focus on the
large-scale, wind-driven flow of the mid-latitude oceans which contribute in a
crucial way to Earth's climate, and to changes therein. We study the
low-frequency variability (LFV) of the wind-driven, double-gyre circulation in
mid-latitude ocean basins, via the bifurcation sequence that leads from steady
states through periodic solutions and on to the chaotic, irregular flows
documented in the observations. This sequence involves local, pitchfork and
Hopf bifurcations, as well as global, homoclinic ones. The natural climate
variability induced by the LFV of the ocean circulation is but one of the
causes of uncertainties in climate projections. Another major cause of such
uncertainties could reside in the structural instability in the topological
sense, of the equations governing climate dynamics, including but not
restricted to those of atmospheric and ocean dynamics. We propose a novel
approach to understand, and possibly reduce, these uncertainties, based on the
concepts and methods of random dynamical systems theory. As a very first step,
we study the effect of noise on the topological classes of the Arnol'd family
of circle maps, a paradigmatic model of frequency locking as occurring in the
nonlinear interactions between the El Nino-Southern Oscillations (ENSO) and the
seasonal cycle. It is shown that the maps' fine-grained resonant landscape is
smoothed by the noise, thus permitting their coarse-grained classification.
This result is consistent with stabilizing effects of stochastic
parametrization obtained in modeling of ENSO phenomenon via some general
circulation models.Comment: Invited survey paper for Special Issue on The Euler Equations: 250
Years On, in Physica D: Nonlinear phenomen
Invariant Measures for Dissipative Dynamical Systems: Abstract Results and Applications
In this work we study certain invariant measures that can be associated to
the time averaged observation of a broad class of dissipative semigroups via
the notion of a generalized Banach limit. Consider an arbitrary complete
separable metric space which is acted on by any continuous semigroup
. Suppose that possesses a global
attractor . We show that, for any generalized Banach limit
and any distribution of initial
conditions , that there exists an invariant probability measure
, whose support is contained in , such that for all
observables living in a suitable function space of continuous mappings
on .
This work is based on a functional analytic framework simplifying and
generalizing previous works in this direction. In particular our results rely
on the novel use of a general but elementary topological observation, valid in
any metric space, which concerns the growth of continuous functions in the
neighborhood of compact sets. In the case when does not
possess a compact absorbing set, this lemma allows us to sidestep the use of
weak compactness arguments which require the imposition of cumbersome weak
continuity conditions and limits the phase space to the case of a reflexive
Banach space. Two examples of concrete dynamical systems where the semigroup is
known to be non-compact are examined in detail.Comment: To appear in Communications in Mathematical Physic
Reduction of dimension for nonlinear dynamical systems
We consider reduction of dimension for nonlinear dynamical systems. We
demonstrate that in some cases, one can reduce a nonlinear system of equations
into a single equation for one of the state variables, and this can be useful
for computing the solution when using a variety of analytical approaches. In
the case where this reduction is possible, we employ differential elimination
to obtain the reduced system. While analytical, the approach is algorithmic,
and is implemented in symbolic software such as {\sc MAPLE} or {\sc SageMath}.
In other cases, the reduction cannot be performed strictly in terms of
differential operators, and one obtains integro-differential operators, which
may still be useful. In either case, one can use the reduced equation to both
approximate solutions for the state variables and perform chaos diagnostics
more efficiently than could be done for the original higher-dimensional system,
as well as to construct Lyapunov functions which help in the large-time study
of the state variables. A number of chaotic and hyperchaotic dynamical systems
are used as examples in order to motivate the approach.Comment: 16 pages, no figure
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