Abstract
A method of visualizing structures in closed chaotic flows out of homogenous particle distributions is presented in the example of models of a meandering jet. To this end, the system will be leaked or opened up by defining a region of the flow, so that a particle is considered to be escaped if it leaves this region. By applying this method to an ensemble of nonescaped tracers, we are able to characterize mixing processes by visualizing the converging and stretching filamentations (stable and unstable manifolds) in the flow without using additional mathematical tools. The possibility of applying the algorithm to analyze buoy data, and a comparison with the finite time manifolds are discussed.
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Received: 29 October 2002 / Accepted: 7 February 2003
Responsible Editor: Jörg-Olaf Wolff
Acknowledgements. Useful discussions are acknowledged with A. Bracco, U. Feudel, E. Hernández-Garcia, Z. Neufeld, O. Piro, A. Provenzale, J. Schmalzl, and J. Weiss. We are grateful to the authors of López et al. (2001), who kindly allowed us to use one of their figures. This research has been supported by the Hungarian Research Foundation (OTKA T032423). J.S. is grateful for a scholarship from the International Max Planck Research School for Biomimetic Systems (IMPRS). J.S. and T.T. were supported by the DAAD 324/PPP-Ungarn-ssch grant.
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Schneider, J., Tél, T. Extracting flow structures from tracer data. Ocean Dynamics 53, 64–72 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-003-0024-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-003-0024-0