Reservoir computing model of two-dimensional turbulent convection

Abstract: Reservoir computing is applied to model the large-scale evolution and the resulting low-order turbulence statistics of a two-dimensional turbulent Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection flow at a Rayleigh number ${\rm Ra}=10^7$ and a Prandtl number ${\rm Pr}=7$ in an extended domain with an aspect ratio of 6. Our data-driven approach which is based on a long-term direct numerical simulation of the convection flow comprises a two-step procedure. (1) Reduction of the original simulation data by a Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) snapshot analysis and subsequent truncation to the first 150 POD modes which are associated with the largest total energy amplitudes. (2) Setup and optimization of a reservoir computing model to describe the dynamical evolution of these 150 degrees of freedom and thus the large-scale evolution of the convection flow. The quality of the prediction of the reservoir computing model is comprehensively tested. At the core of the model is the reservoir, a very large sparse random network charcterized by the spectral radius of the corresponding adjacency matrix and a few further hyperparameters which are varied to investigate the quality of the prediction. Our work demonstrates that the reservoir computing model is capable to model the large-scale structure and low-order statistics of turbulent convection which can open new avenues for modeling mesoscale convection processes in larger circulation models.