Statistical Nonlocality of Dynamically Coherent Structures

Abstract

We introduce a class of stochastic advection problems amenable to analysis of turbulent transport. The statistics of the flow field are represented as a continuous time Markov process, a choice that captures the intuitive notion of turbulence as moving from one coherent structure to another. We obtain closed form expressions for the turbulent transport operator without invoking approximations. We recover the classical estimate of turbulent transport as a diffusivity tensor, the components of which are the integrated auto-correlation of the velocity field, in the limit that the operator becomes local in space and time.