Dr. Thomas DeWitt 09-02-2026 Weather and Climate Without Fluid Mechanics Atmospheric Sciences

Weather and Climate Without Fluid Mechanics Even if it were possible, attempting to model the motion of a fluid in a pipe by tracking each individual molecule would be an extraordinary waste of computation. The emergent laws of fluid mechanics accomplish the same goal on a laptop instead of a datacenter. But a sufficiently complex fluid such as in Earth's atmosphere again requires a datacenter, this time to resolve the many contortions in the dynamic and thermodynamic fields making up our weather. Might there be some analogous set of emergent laws that would represent the effect of these perturbations without needing their explicit representation on a numerical grid? Though some explicit emergent laws exist, they are limited by the concepts they assume. We propose a new framework based on a new fundamental building block of the atmosphere that we term a ``turbulon'', inspired by turbulence. A model built on these new laws can simulate three-dimensional atmospheric volumes are broadly plausible when compared to state-of-the-art hydrodynamic simulation output despite costing nearly a million times less computationally. Some aspects of the model clearly need improvement, though other statistics reproduce observations better than hydrodynamic models, and visualizations of simulated clouds are strikingly realistic. Perhaps the Navier-Stokes equations are not truly required for simulation and prediction of Earth's weather and climate after all.