Computation of hyperbolic trajectories and their stable and unstable manifolds for oceanographic flows represented as data sets

Abstract. In this paper, we describe a unified algorithm for locating and computing hyperbolic trajectories, and then computing their stable and unstable manifolds, for finite time velocity fields in the form of a data set defined on a space-time grid. The algorithm is applied to a turbulent regime of a quasigeostrophic wind-driven double gyre in a rectangular domain.