Assessing Relative Dispersion

Abstract

We assess the four point method of relative dispersion proposed by Jones and Winkler to identify the hyperbolic trajectories of a system. We sample a discrete analog to a quasi-geostrophic, single layered flow field and perform a comparison of the dispersion of neighboring points after iteration. We evaluate our method by performing a transformation to ( x, y ) space and comparing the trajectories corresponding to maximum dispersion with the ( x, y ) values of trajectories of the Standard map, derived from traditional techniques. We perform a similar evaluation using a 2 D Ross by wave. We show that the method of relative dispersion is able to generate 2 nd order accurate (on the scale of the discretization) hyperbolic trajectories.