Extracting information from massive simulations of geophysical turbulent flows

P.D. MININNI

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Workshop ?Big data and environment?; 2015

CELFI

Numerical simulations of geophysical turbulent flows are dominated by the presence of repeating patterns known as coherent structures. These persistent features are not yet well understood, but are believed to play an important role in the transport and dynamics of turbulent fluid motion. To facilitate their investigation, a variety of techniques (from statistical techniques to methods to track the paths of individual structures) have been developed. However, the growth in computing power allows us today to generate Petabytes of data which create new challenges for these techniques. In this talk I will briefly review some of the current challenges when studying turbulent flows using numerical simulations, considering in particular two cases: the case of an idealised rotating flow, and a more realistic rotating and stratified flow intended to model the dynamics of the southern abyssal ocean at mid latitudes. Then, I will present a new method designed to track coherent structures in these flows, based on the physics of the underlying solutions to the equations of fluid motion. The accuracy of the method is superior to other methods reported elsewhere, and the physical information significantly reduces computational costs allowing analysis of huge datasets.