Understanding the extreme events in turbulent flows

Turbulent flows, like planetary atmospheres, oceans, or flow around an airfoil or a wind turbine, undergo strong fluctuations. Sometimes, the system may even undergo abrupt transitions between entirely different flow configurations. Such transitions seem to occur at random times, in an unpredictable manner. CNRS researcher at Laboratoire de physique at ENS in Lyon, Corentin Herbert developed the research project TransTurb (Large deviations and rare transitions in turbulent flows) in collaboration with Freddy Bouchet, CNRS research director. The richness of turbulence continues to pose many problems for theoretical physics. In particular, the study of extreme events is crucial for weather, climate and many technical applications, but these events remain poorly understood. The first deadlock is that we are interested in rare events, for which, by definition, we have few observations.