Assimilation of Nearly Turbulent Rayleigh-Benard Flow Through Vorticity or Local Circulation Measurements: A Computational Study

We introduce a continuous (downscaling) data assimilation algorithm for the 2D Benard convection problem using vorticity or local circulation measurements only. In this algorithm, a nudging term is added to the vorticity equation to constrain the model. Our numerical results indicate that the approximate solution of the algorithm is converging to the unknown reference solution (vorticity and temperature) corresponding to the measurements of the 2D Benard convection problem when only spatial coarse-grain measurements of vorticity are assimilated. Moreover, this convergence is realized using data which is much more coarse than the resolution needed to satisfy rigorous analytical estimates.