Atmospheric Lagrangian coherent structures considering unresolved turbulence and forecast uncertainty

Abstract

To obtain more realistic approximations of atmospheric Lagrangian coherent structures, the material surfaces which form a template for the Lagrangian transport, two concepts are considered. First, the effect of unresolved turbulent motion due to finite spatiotemporal resolution of velocity field data is studied and the resulting qualitative changes on the FTLE field and LCSs are observed. Stochastic simulations show that these changes depend on the probabilistic distribution of position of released virtual particles after backward or forward time integration. We find that even with diffusion included, the LCSs play a role in structuring and bifurcating the probability distribution. Second, the uncertainty of the forecast FTLE fields is analyzed using ensemble forecasting. Unavoidable errors of the forecast velocity data due to the chaotic dynamics of the atmosphere is the salient reason for errors of the flow maps from which the FTLE fields are determined. The common practice for uncertainty analysis is to apply ensemble forecasting and here this approach is extended to FTLE field calculations. Previous work has shown an association between LCS passage and fluctuations in microbial populations and we find that ensemble FTLE forecasts are sufficient to predict such passages one day ahead of time with an accuracy of about 2h.