The Statistical Predictability Theory

Abstract

The concept of predictability has been widely used throughout the preceding chapters, and is one of the major ingredients in our definition of turbulence. When turbulence is examined from the point of view of the “chaos” in dynamical systems, the predictability is studied by looking at the sign of the Liapounov exponent l, with d(t) ∝ e^lt, where d(t) is an appropriate measure of the distance between two points representing the system and initially very close in the phase space: a positive exponent means then an exponential separation, and implies loss of predictability.