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Reduced Models Of Point Vortex Systems In Quasigeostrophic Fluid Dynamics, Jonathan Maack

Doctoral Dissertations

We develop a nonequilibrium statistical mechanical description of the evolution of point vortex systems governed by either the Euler, single-layer quasigeostrophic or two-layer quasigeostrophic equations. Our approach is based on a recently proposed optimal closure procedure for deriving reduced models of Hamiltonian systems. In this theory the statistical evolution is kept within a parametric family of distributions based on the resolved variables chosen to describe the macrostate of the system. The approximate evolution is matched as closely as possible to the true evolution by minimizing the mean-squared residual in the Liouville equation, a metric which quantifies the information loss rate …