Intermittency-induced transitions in fast-slow dynamical systems

Abstract: Intermittent dynamics are ubiquitous in the Earth system and often arise from the interaction of processes evolving on different time scales. In this work, we investigate how intermittent bursts in a fast forcing system propagate to and reshape the dynamics of a slower response system that would otherwise settle onto a quasi-stationary or weakly oscillatory regime. We address this question in two coupled models of increasing complexity: a low-dimensional Lorenz-63 system and the spatially extended Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. Across both systems, intermittency in the forcing progressively reshapes the attractor of the slow response system and drives it into different regimes. Using the Wasserstein distance, we show that increasing the frequency of intermittent events progressively displaces the response attractor from its unperturbed counterpart, up to a limit beyond which this deviation saturates. We then show that varying the forcing intensity and the time-scale separation between the forcing and response systems drives distinct regime transitions, which we characterize through the variance of ensemble maxima, the power spectra of both systems, and extreme value statistics. Finally, we examine how the type of intermittency in the forcing system affects synchronization between the two systems through local phase locking, showing that specific transitions in the phase-locking behavior are tied to the underlying intermittency regime, and that the response delay scales exponentially with the time-scale separation.