Stationarity of Lagrangian Velocity¶in Compressible Environments

We study the transport of a passive tracer particle by a random d-dimensional, Gaussian, compressible velocity field. It is well known, since the work of Lumley, see [13], and Port and Stone, see [20], that the observations of the velocity field from the moving particle, the so-called Lagrangian velocity process, are statistically stationary when the field itself is incompressible. In this paper we study the question of stationarity of Lagrangian observations in compressible environments. We show that, given sufficient temporal decorrelation of the velocity statistics, there exists a transformation of the original probability measure, under which the Lagrangian velocity process is time stationary. The transformed probability is equivalent to the original measure. As an application of this result we prove the law of large numbers for the particle trajectory. Received: 1 May 2001 / Accepted: 4 December 2001