Reduced data-driven turbulence closure for capturing long-term statistics

We introduce a simple, stochastic, a-posteriori, turbulence closure model based on a reduced subgrid scale term. This subgrid scale term is tailor-made to capture the statistics of a small set of spatially-integrated quantities of interest (QoIs), with only one unresolved scalar time series per QoI. In contrast to other data-driven surrogates the dimension of the “learning problem” is reduced from an evolving field to one scalar time series per QoI. We use an a-posteriori, nudging approach to find the distribution of the scalar series over time. This approach has the advantage of taking the interaction between the solver and the surrogate into account. A stochastic surrogate parametrization is obtained by random sampling from the found distribution for the scalar time series. We compare the new method to an a-priori trained convolutional neural network on two-dimensional forced turbulence. Evaluating the new method is computationally much cheaper and gives similar long-term statistics.