Strange attractors in fluid dynamics

The paper examines statistical procedures aimed at testing whether a given aperiodic time series can be modeled by a solution of a discrete dynamical system of a given order. The time series analysis is based on a quantitative formulation of the strange-attractor hypothesis. Results indicate that it is possible to estimate the variance in the random perturbation of a strange attractor. It is noted that it may be possible to apply these methods to experimental data from fluid experiments in the regime just beyond the onset of chaos in order to test the above-mentioned hypothesis.