Shocks, Solitons and Turbulence Unit (Emile Touber)

The Blue and Green Planet

We study linear and nonlinear wave phenomena with a primary interest in energy redistribution across space-time. We currently focus on applications in the area of:

1. Ocean-atmosphere energy exchanges: large-scale interactions between the ocean, the atmosphere and the ionosphere (e.g. meteo-tsunamis), surface transport phenomena induced by winds, currents and tides (e.g. dynamics of surface slicks produced by living organisms), coastal flows (e.g. coral-reef dynamics across time scales).
    
2. Land-atmosphere energy exchanges: forest dynamics (e.g. soil-tree-air interactions and associated groundwater flows), fluid dynamics of trees (e.g. high-frequency bole dynamics, internal flows), thermal atmospheric tides (e.g. ground-pressure fluctuations and coupling with sub-diurnal flows in trees).
    

For each topic we seek to predict and possibly control the future state of the system under consideration. To do so we develop simple (hopefully not too simple) dynamical models that capture the rich and complex nature of the phenomenon under investigation. We use a mixture of theoretical, computational and observational tools.