arXiv subjects

Paolo Cifani

Publications and source records attributed to Paolo Cifani.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Stochastic modeling of Fourier modes in two-dimensional turbulence via filtered white noise

Modeling turbulent flows by a random Fourier decomposition is a classical procedure in order to use simplified models of turbulence in heat transport and other applications. We investigate the Fourier time series of two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with friction and damping, forced at intermediate scales, and identify significant statistical structures. In particular, we find the existence of a typical time correlation length, and propose a stochastic model for the Fourier components. Finally, we compute the transport of a passive scalar under advection-diffusion dynamics by means of direct numerical simulation of the stochastic damped Navier-Stokes equation and compare it with analytical predictions of the effective diffusion produced by the stochastic model.

math-ph↗

arXiv2026

Symplectic Isospectral Runge--Kutta Methods as Lie group methods

We compare three approaches for structure preserving numerical integration of isospectral flows on quadratic Lie algebras. Such flows originate from Hamiltonian dynamics on the cotangent bundle of the Lie group. It is known, via discrete reduction theory, that symplectic Runge--Kutta methods applied to the cotangent bundle formulation induce isospectral symplectic Runge--Kutta (ISOSYRK) schemes on the Lie algebra. Here, we show that the same symplectic Runge--Kutta method, but applied to the transport formulation of the flow on the Lie group, is equivalent to the corresponding ISOSYRK scheme. We also give numerical results suggesting that the formulation on the Lie group is more efficient for schemes with two or more intermediate stages.

math.NA↗

arXiv2026

Anomalous diffusion properties of stochastic transport by heavy-tailed jump processes

In this work, we investigate the large-scale transport properties of a passive scalar advected by a turbulent fluid, modelled as a superposition of divergence-free vector fields, each weighted by an independent symmetric $α$-stable-like process. Motivated by recent works showing that complex small-scale spatial structures often lead to Brownian dispersion, we study if this principle persists when the driving noise exhibits heavy-tailed jump statistics. Our numerical results show a clear dichotomy linked with the tail behaviour of the noise. When considering standard $α$-stable processes, very large jumps survive the interaction with the spatial complexity and yield anomalous, super-diffusive transport. In contrast, when the $α$-stable noise is either truncated or exponentially tempered, suppressing extremely long jumps, the transport undergoes a transition to a classical diffusive regime.

math-ph↗

arXiv2025

Diffusion properties of small-scale fractional transport models

Stochastic transport due to a velocity field modeled by the superposition of small-scale divergence free vector fields activated by Fractional Gaussian Noises (FGN) is numerically investigated. We present two non-trivial contributions: the first one is the definition of a model where different space-time structures can be compared on the same ground: this is achieved by imposing the same average kinetic energy to a standard Ornstein-Uhlenbeck approximation, then taking the limit to the idealized white noise structure. The second contribution, based on the previous one, is the discover that a mixing spatial structure with persistent FGN in the Fourier components induces a classical Brownian diffusion of passive particles, with suitable diffusion coefficient; namely, the memory of FGN is lost in the space complexity of the velocity field.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2024

A continuous data assimilation closure for modeling statistically steady turbulence in large-eddy simulation

A closure model is presented for large-eddy simulation (LES) based on the three-dimensional variational data assimilation algorithm. The approach aims at reconstructing high-fidelity kinetic energy spectra in coarse numerical simulations by including feedback control to represent unresolved dynamics interactions in the flow as stochastic processes. The forcing uses statistics obtained from offline high-fidelity data and requires only few parameters compared to the number of degrees of freedom of LES. This modeling strategy is applied to geostrophic turbulence on the sphere and enables simulating indefinitely at reduced costs. It proves to accurately recover the energy spectra and the zonal velocity profiles in the coarse model, for three generic situations.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2024

Zeitlin truncation of a Shallow Water Quasi-Geostrophic model for planetary flow

In this work, we consider a Shallow-Water Quasi Geostrophic equation on the sphere, as a model for global large-scale atmospheric dynamics. This equation, previously studied by Verkley (2009) and Schubert et al. (2009), possesses a rich geometric structure, called Lie-Poisson, and admits an infinite number of conserved quantities, called Casimirs. In this paper, we develop a Casimir preserving numerical method for long-time simulations of this equation. The method develops in two steps: firstly, we construct an N-dimensional Lie-Poisson system that converges to the continuous one in the limit $N \to \infty$; secondly, we integrate in time the finite-dimensional system using an isospectral time integrator, developed by Modin and Viviani (2020). We demonstrate the efficacy of this computational method by simulating a flow on the entire sphere for different values of the Lamb parameter. We particularly focus on rotation-induced effects, such as the formation of jets. In agreement with shallow water models of the atmosphere, we observe the formation of robust latitudinal jets and a decrease in the zonal wind amplitude with latitude. Furthermore, spectra of the kinetic energy are computed as a point of reference for future studies.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2024

Data-driven spectral turbulence modeling for Rayleigh-Bénard convection

A data-driven turbulence model for coarse-grained numerical simulations of two-dimensional Rayleigh-Bénard convection is proposed. The model starts from high-fidelity data and is based on adjusting the Fourier coefficients of the numerical solution, with the aim of accurately reproducing the kinetic energy spectra as seen in the high-fidelity reference findings. No assumptions about the underlying PDE or numerical discretization are used in the formulation of the model. We also develop a constraint on the heat flux to guarantee accurate Nusselt number estimates on coarse computational grids and high Rayleigh numbers. Model performance is assessed in coarse numerical simulations at $Ra=10^{10}$. We focus on key features including kinetic energy spectra, wall-normal flow statistics, and global flow statistics. The method of data-driven modeling of flow dynamics is found to reproduce the reference kinetic energy spectra well across all scales and yields good results for flow statistics and average heat transfer, leading to computationally cheap surrogate models. Large-scale forcing extracted from the high-fidelity simulation leads to accurate Nusselt number predictions across two decades of Rayleigh numbers, centered around the targeted reference at $Ra=10^{10}$.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2023

Casimir preserving stochastic Lie-Poisson integrators

Casimir preserving integrators for stochastic Lie-Poisson equations with Stratonovich noise are developed extending Runge-Kutta Munthe-Kaas methods. The underlying Lie-Poisson structure is preserved along stochastic trajectories. A related stochastic differential equation on the Lie algebra is derived. The solution of this differential equation updates the evolution of the Lie-Poisson dynamics by means of the exponential map. The constructed numerical method conserves Casimir-invariants exactly, which is important for long time integration. This is illustrated numerically for the case of the stochastic heavy top and the stochastic sine-Euler equations.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

Data-driven stochastic spectral modeling for coarsening of the two-dimensional Euler equations on the sphere

A resolution-independent data-driven stochastic parametrization method for subgrid-scale processes in coarsened fluid descriptions is proposed. The method enables the inclusion of high-fidelity data into the coarsened flow model, thereby enabling accurate simulations also with the coarser representation. The small-scale parametrization is introduced at the level of the Fourier coefficients of the coarsened numerical solution. It is designed to reproduce the kinetic energy spectra observed in high-fidelity data of the same system. The approach is based on a control feedback term reminiscent of continuous data assimilation. The method relies solely on the availability of high-fidelity data from a statistically steady state. No assumptions are made regarding the adopted discretization method or the selected coarser resolution. The performance of the method is assessed for the two-dimensional Euler equations on the sphere. Applying the method at two significantly coarser resolutions yields good results for the mean and variance of the Fourier coefficients. Stable and accurate large-scale dynamics can be simulated over long integration times.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2023

Sparse-stochastic model reduction for 2D Euler equations

The 2D Euler equations are a simple but rich set of non-linear PDEs that describe the evolution of an ideal inviscid fluid, for which one dimension is negligible. Solving numerically these equations can be extremely demanding. Several techniques to obtain fast and accurate simulations have been developed during the last decades. In this paper, we present a novel approach which combines recent developments in the stochastic model reduction and conservative semi-discretization of the Euler equations. In particular, starting from the Zeitlin model on the 2-sphere, we derive reduced dynamics for large scales and we close the equations either deterministically or with a suitable stochastic term. Numerical experiments show that, after an initial turbulent regime, the influence of small scales to large scales is negligible, even though a non-zero transfer of energy among different modes is present.

math.NA↗

arXiv2022

An efficient geometric method for incompressible hydrodynamics on the sphere

We present an efficient and highly scalable geometric method for two-dimensional ideal fluid dynamics on the sphere. The starting point is Zeitlin's finite-dimensional model of hydrodynamics. The efficiency stems from exploiting a tridiagonal splitting of the discrete spherical Laplacian combined with highly optimized, scalable numerical algorithms. For time-stepping, we adopt a recently developed isospectral integrator able to preserve the geometric structure of Euler's equations, in particular conservation of the Casimir functions. To overcome previous computational bottlenecks, we formulate the matrix Lie algebra basis through a sequence of tridiagonal eigenvalue problems, efficiently solved by well-established linear algebra libraries. The same tridiagonal splitting allows for computation of the stream matrix, involving the inverse Laplacian, for which we design an efficient parallel implementation on distributed memory systems. The resulting overall computational complexity is $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ per time-step for $N^2$ spatial degrees of freedom. The dominating computational cost is matrix-matrix multiplication, carried out via the parallel library ScaLAPACK. Scaling tests show approximately linear scaling up to around $2500$ cores for the matrix size $N=4096$ with a computational time per time-step of about $0.55$ seconds. These results allow for long-time simulations and the gathering of statistical quantities while simultaneously conserving the Casimir functions. We illustrate the developed algorithm for Euler's equations at the resolution $N=2048$.

math-ph↗

arXiv2022

Casimir preserving spectrum of two-dimensional turbulence

We present predictions of the energy spectrum of forced two-dimensional turbulence obtained by employing a structure-preserving integrator. In particular, we construct a finite-mode approximation of the Navier-Stokes equations on the unit sphere, which, in the limit of vanishing viscosity, preserves the Lie-Poisson structure. As a result, integrated powers of vorticity are conserved in the inviscid limit. We obtain robust evidence for the existence of the double energy cascade, including the formation of the -3 scaling of the inertial range of the direct cascade. We show that this can be achieved at modest resolutions compared to those required by traditional numerical methods.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2022

Data-driven stochastic Lie transport modelling of the 2D Euler equations

In this paper, we propose and assess several stochastic parametrizations for data-driven modelling of the two-dimensional Euler equations using coarse-grid SPDEs. The framework of Stochastic Advection by Lie Transport (SALT) [Cotter et al., 2019] is employed to define a stochastic forcing that is decomposed in terms of a deterministic basis (empirical orthogonal functions, EOFs) multiplied by temporal traces, here regarded as stochastic processes. The EOFs are obtained from a fine-grid data set and are defined in conjunction with corresponding deterministic time series. We construct stochastic processes that mimic properties of the measured time series. In particular, the processes are defined such that the underlying probability density functions (pdfs) or the estimated correlation time of the time series are retained. These stochastic models are compared to stochastic forcing based on Gaussian noise, which does not use any information of the time series. We perform uncertainty quantification tests and compare stochastic ensembles in terms of mean and spread. Reduced uncertainty is observed for the developed models. On short timescales, such as those used for data assimilation [Cotter et al., 2020], the stochastic models show a reduced ensemble mean error and a reduced spread. Particularly, using estimated pdfs yields stochastic ensembles which rarely fail to capture the reference solution on small time scales, whereas introducing correlation into the stochastic models improves the quality of the coarse-grid predictions with respect to Gaussian noise.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2022

Computational modeling for high-fidelity coarsening of shallow water equations based on subgrid data

Small-scale features of shallow water flow obtained from direct numerical simulation (DNS) with two different computational codes for the shallow water equations are gathered offline and subsequently employed with the aim of constructing a reduced-order correction. This is used to facilitate high-fidelity online flow predictions at much reduced costs on coarse meshes. The resolved small-scale features at high resolution represent subgrid properties for the coarse representation. Measurements of the subgrid dynamics are obtained as the difference between the evolution of a coarse grid solution and the corresponding DNS result. The measurements are sensitive to the particular numerical methods used for the simulation on coarse computational grids and can be used to approximately correct the associated discretization errors. The subgrid features are decomposed into empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs), after which a corresponding correction term is constructed. By increasing the number of EOFs in the approximation of the measured values the correction term can in principle be made arbitrarily accurate. Both computational methods investigated here show a significant decrease in the simulation error already when applying the correction based on the dominant EOFs only. The error reduction accounts for the particular discretization errors that incur and are hence specific to the particular simulation method that is adopted. This improvement is also observed for very coarse grids which may be used for computational model reduction in geophysical and turbulent flow problems.

physics.flu-dyn↗