A realtime observatory for laboratory simulation of planetary flows

Abstract

Motivated by the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, we develop a system that uses observations from a laboratory analog to constrain, in real time, a numerical simulation of the laboratory flow. This system provides a tool to rapidly prototype new methods for state and parameter estimation, and facilitates the study of prediction, predictability, and transport of geophysical fluids where observations or numerical simulations would not independently suffice. A computer vision system is used to extract measurements of the physical simulation. Observations are used to constrain the model-state of the MIT General Circulation Model in a probabilistic, ensemble based assimilation approach. Using a combination of parallelism, domain decomposition and an efficient scheme to select ensembles of model-states, we show that estimates that effectively track the fluid state can be produced. To the best of our knowledge this is the first such observatory for laboratory analogs of planetary circulation that functions in real time.