Di Qi

We study the statistical properties of passive tracer transport in turbulent flows with a mean gradient, emphasizing tracer intermittency and extreme events. An analytically tractable model is developed, coupling zonal and shear velocity components with both linear and non-linear stochastic dynamics. Formulating the model in Fourier space, a simple explicit solution for the tracer invariant statistics is derived. Through this model we identify the resonance condition responsible for non-Gaussian behaviour and bursts in the tracer. Resonant conditions, that lead to a peak in the tracer variance, occur when the zonal flow and the shear flow phase speeds are equivalent. Numerical experiments across a range of regimes, including different energy spectra and zonal flow models, are performed to validate the theoretical findings and demonstrate how the velocity field and stochasticity determines tracer extremes. These results provide additional insight into the mechanisms underlying turbulent tracer transport, with implications for uncertainty quantification and data assimilation in geophysical and environmental applications.

This paper discusses the control of coherent structures in turbulent flows, which has broad applications among complex systems in science and technology. Mean field games have been proved a powerful tool and are proposed here to control the stochastic Lagrangian particles as players tracking the flow and tracer fields. We derive optimal control solutions for general nonlinear fluid systems using mean-field game models and develop computational algorithms to efficiently solve the resulting coupled forward and backward mean-field system. A precise link is established for the control of passive tracer density and the scalar vorticity field based on the functional Hamilton–Jacobi equations derived from the mean field models. A new iterative numerical strategy is then constructed to compute the optimal solution with fast convergence. We verify the skill of the mean-field control models and illustrate their practical efficiency on a prototype model modified from the viscous Burgers equation under various cost functions in both deterministic and stochastic formulations. The good model performance implies potential effectiveness of the strategy for more general high-dimensional turbulent systems.

Data-driven modeling methods are studied for turbulent dynamical systems with extreme events under an unambiguous model framework. New neural network architectures are proposed to effectively learn the key dynamical mechanisms including the multiscale coupling and strong instability, and gain robust skill for long-time prediction resistive to the accumulated model errors from the data-driven approximation. The machine learning model overcomes the inherent limitations in traditional long short-time memory networks by exploiting a conditional Gaussian structure informed of the essential physical dynamics. The model performance is demonstrated under a prototype model from idealized geophysical flow and passive tracers, which exhibits analytical solutions with representative statistical features. Many attractive properties are found in the trained model in recovering the hidden dynamics using a limited dataset and sparse observation time, showing uniformly high skill with persistent numerical stability in predicting both the trajectory and statistical solutions among different statistical regimes away from the training regime. The model framework is promising to be applied to a wider class of turbulent systems with complex structures.

This work introduces the “potential vorticity bucket brigade,” a mechanism for explaining the resilience of vortex structures in magnetically confined fusion plasmas and geophysical flows. Drawing parallels with zonal jet formation, we show how inhomogeneous patterns of mixing can reinforce, rather than destroy non-zonal flow structure. We accomplish this through an exact stochastic Lagrangian representation of vorticity transport, together with a near-integrability property, which relates coherent flow topology to fluid relabeling symmetries. We demonstrate these ideas in the context of gradient-driven magnetized plasma turbulence, though the tools we develop here are model-agnostic and applicable beyond the system studied here.

This paper discusses the control of coherent structures in turbulent flows, which has broad applications among complex systems in science and technology. Mean field games have been proved a powerful tool and are proposed here to control the stochastic Lagrangian tracers as players tracking the flow field. We derive optimal control solutions for general nonlinear fluid systems using mean field game models, and develop computational algorithms to efficiently solve the resulting coupled forward and backward mean field system. A precise link is established for the control of Lagrangian tracers and the scalar vorticity field based on the functional Hamilton-Jacobi equations derived from the mean field models. New iterative numerical strategy is then constructed to compute the optimal solution with fast convergence. We verify the skill of the mean field control models and illustrate their practical efficiency on a prototype model modified from the viscous Burger's equation under various cost functions in both deterministic and stochastic formulations. The good model performance implies potential effectiveness of the strategy for more general high-dimensional turbulent systems.

Control of complex turbulent dynamical systems involving strong nonlinearity and high degrees of internal instability is an important topic in practice. Different from traditional methods for controlling individual trajectories, controlling the statistical features of a turbulent system offers a more robust and efficient approach. Crude first-order linear response approximations were typically employed in previous works for statistical control with small initial perturbations. This paper aims to develop two new statistical control strategies for scenarios with more significant initial perturbations and stronger nonlinear responses, allowing the statistical control framework to be applied to a much wider range of problems. First, higher-order methods, incorporating the second-order terms, are developed to resolve the full control-forcing relation. The corresponding changes to recovering the forcing perturbation effectively improve the performance of the statistical control strategy. Second, a mean closure model for the mean response is developed, which is based on the explicit mean dynamics given by the underlying turbulent dynamical system. The dependence of the mean dynamics on higher-order moments is closed using linear response theory but for the response of the second-order moments to the forcing perturbation rather than the mean response directly. The performance of these methods is evaluated extensively on prototype nonlinear test models, which exhibit crucial turbulent features, including non-Gaussian statistics and regime switching with large initial perturbations. The numerical results illustrate the feasibility of different approaches due to their physical and statistical structures and provide detailed guidelines for choosing the most suitable method based on the model properties.

We propose a high-order stochastic–statistical moment closure model for efficient ensemble prediction of leading-order statistical moments and probability density functions in multiscale complex turbulent systems. The statistical moment equations are closed by a precise calibration of the high-order feedbacks using ensemble solutions of the consistent stochastic equations, suitable for modeling complex phenomena including non-Gaussian statistics and extreme events. To address challenges associated with closely coupled spatiotemporal scales in turbulent states and expensive large ensemble simulation for high-dimensional systems, we introduce efficient computational strategies using the random batch method (RBM). This approach significantly reduces the required ensemble size while accurately capturing essential high-order structures. Only a small batch of small-scale fluctuation modes is used for each time update of the samples, and exact convergence to the full model statistics is ensured through frequent resampling of the batches during time evolution. Furthermore, we develop a reduced-order model to handle systems with really high dimensions by linking the large number of small-scale fluctuation modes to ensemble samples of dominant leading modes. The effectiveness of the proposed models is validated by numerical experiments on the one-layer and two-layer Lorenz ‘96 systems, which exhibit representative chaotic features and various statistical regimes. The full and reduced-order RBM models demonstrate uniformly high skill in capturing the time evolution of crucial leading-order statistics, non-Gaussian probability distributions, while achieving significantly lower computational cost compared to direct Monte-Carlo approaches. The models provide effective tools for a wide range of real-world applications in prediction, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation.