Closed-loop adaptive control of extreme events in a turbulent flow

Extreme events that arise spontaneously in chaotic dynamical systems often have an adverse impact on the system or the surrounding environment. As such, their mitigation is highly desirable. Here, we introduce a novel control strategy for mitigating extreme events in a turbulent shear flow. The controller combines a probabilistic prediction of the extreme events with a deterministic actuator. The predictions are used to actuate the controller only when an extreme event is imminent. When actuated, the controller only acts on the degrees of freedom that are involved in the formation of the extreme events, exerting minimal interference with the flow dynamics. As a result, the attractors of the controlled and uncontrolled systems share the same chaotic core (containing the non-extreme events) and only differ in the tail of their distributions. We propose that such adaptive low-dimensional controllers should be used to mitigate extreme events in general chaotic dynamical systems, beyond the shear flow considered here.