Stochastic Erosion of Fractal Structure in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

Abstract:

We analyze the effects of stochastic noise on the Lorenz-63 model in the chaotic regime to demonstrate a set of general issues arising in the interpretation of data from nonlinear dynamical systems typical in geophysics. The model is forced using both additive and multiplicative, white and colored noise and it is shown that, through a suitable choice of the noise intensity, both additive and multiplicative noise can produce similar dynamics. We use a recently developed measure, histogram distance, to show the similarity between the dynamics produced by additive and multiplicative forcing. This phenomenon, in a nonlinear fractal structure with chaotic dynamics can be explained by understanding how noise affects the Unstable Periodic Orbits (UPOs) of the system. For delta-correlated noise, the UPOs erode the fractal structure. In the presence of memory in the noise forcing, the time scale of the noise starts to interact with the period of some UPO and, depending on the noise intensity, stochastic resonance may be observed. This also explains the mixing in dissipative dynamical systems in presence of white noise; as the fractal structure is smoothed, the decay of correlations is enhanced, and hence the rate of mixing increases with noise intensity.