Volume-preserving Lagrangian averaging using polar factorization

Abstract

The generalised Lagrangian mean (GLM) theory of Andrews & McIntyre provides a powerful framework to study the interactions between waves and flows. A drawback of this theory is that the Lagrangian mean velocity is divergent even for incompressible fluids because the mean flow map, which sends the Lagrangian labels of fluid parcels to their mean positions, does not preserve volume. This results, for instance, in vortices shrinking under Lagrangian averaging. We overcome this drawback by revising the definition of the mean flow map, choosing it as the volume-preserving map closest to the "bare" GLM mean map. A standard result of optimal-transport theory then shows that the new mean map is the volume-preserving factor in the polar factorization of the GLM mean map. We develop and implement a numerical method for the computation of the corresponding Lagrangian mean fields from simulation data. The implementation builds on recently developed algorithms for the on-the-fly computation of Lagrangian means using the exponential and Butterworth filters. We demonstrate the value of volume-preserving Lagrangian averaging in simulations of the two-dimensional incompressible and shallow-water models. We compare the Lagrangian-mean fields obtained with and without the volume-preservation constraint.