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2002 LAPCOD Meeting
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Particle trajectory stability and tracer patchiness in 2D incompressible flows
F. J. Beron-Vera, M. J. Olascoaga and M. G. Brown
RSMAS
mbrown@rsmas.miami.edu(Abstract received 11/14/2002 for session B)
ABSTRACT
Particle motion is considered in 2D incompressible flows consisting of a steady background on which a wave-like perturbation is superimposed. A dynamical systems point of view that exploits the action-angle formalism is adopted. It is argued and demonstrated numerically that for a large class of problems one expects to observe a mixed phase space, i.e., the occurrence of 'regular islands' in an otherwise 'chaotic sea.' This leads to patchiness in the evolution of passive tracer distributions. Also, it is argued and demonstrated numerically that particle trajectory stability is largely controlled by the background flow: trajectory instability, quantified by various measures of the 'degree of chaos,' increases with increasing I|dw/dI| where I is the action and w(I) is the angular frequency of the trajectory in the background flow.
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2002 LAPCOD Meeting, Key Largo, Florida, December 12-16, 2000