Transitory Transport Between Lagrangian Coherent Structures

In recent years, the geophysical and dynamical systems communities have developed numerous novel techniques for identifying structures that remain coherent in the Lagrangian sense in aperiodic time-dependent flows. The existence and persistence of these structures is intimately tied to the dynamical time scales of the flow, and as such, they can lend valuable insight into finite-time transport and mixing processes. Geophysical examples in the recent literature include eddy interaction and transport across ocean currents, transport of water-borne pollutants off the coast of California, and mixing and transport within the stratospheric polar vortex. However, in many cases the identification of the coherent structures themselves is a difficult task, making any further quantification of transport between them over a finite time interval either prohibitively expensive or imprecise. In this talk we consider transitory systems, those that experience time-dependent behavior only on a compact interval in time, and present a method for rigorously quantifying transport between Lagrangian coherent structures over this transition interval. In the systems we consider, this transport is effected by the exchange of "lobes" of fluid particles resulting from the intersection of the invariant manifolds bounding the coherent structures. We provide a method for computing the volumes of these lobes that relies on knowing only the trajectories at the intersections of the manifolds, and we present, as applications of our theory, a 2D rotating double-gyre flow and a 3D transitory version of the classical Arnold-Beltrami-Childress (ABC) flow. These flows can be viewed as simplified kinematic descriptions of eddy-eddy interactions and three-dimensional turbulence, respectively. For the 2D case, we compare our results to a common technique employing finite-time Lyapunov exponents, and discuss the benefits and limitations of both methods.