The problem of estimating the eddy diffusivity from Lagrangian observations
in the presence of measurement error is studied in this paper. We consider a
class of incompressible velocity fields for which is can be rigorously proved
that the small scale dynamics can be parameterised in terms of an eddy
diffusivity tensor. We show, by means of analysis and numerical experiments,
that subsampling of the data is necessary for the accurate estimation of the
eddy diffusivity. The optimal sampling rate depends on the detailed properties
of the velocity field. Furthermore, we show that averaging over the data only
marginally reduces the bias of the estimator due to the multiscale structure of
the problem, but that it does significantly reduce the effect of observation
error
