A Dynamical Systems View of Planetary Turbulence
Jeffrey B. Weiss
Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
University of Colorado, Boulder
The turbulence of planetary atmospheres and oceans self-organizes into
a spatio-temporal pattern of coherent structures such as vortices and
jets. These structures provide insight into the long-standing problem
of reducing fluid turbulence to a chaotic dynamical system. The
attractor of the turbulence is an evolving population of structures,
and the structures' degrees of freedom are the reduced coordinate
system which describe the attractor. These ideas are explored in a
hierarchy of systems with increasing complexity, from Hamiltonian
ordinary differential equations to oceanic observations.