Advection–diffusion in Lagrangian coordinates

Abstract

The advection–diffusion equation can be approximated by a one-dimensional diffusion equation in Lagrangian coordinates along the directions of compression of fluid elements (the stable manifold). This result holds in any number of dimensions, for a velocity field with chaotic trajectories, with an error proportional to the square root of the diffusivity. After some time, the one-dimensional equation becomes invalid, but by that time a large fraction of the scalar variance has decayed.