The project Geo-FLUIDS shall focus on the potential to extract quantitative fluid flow information from image sequences and to design adapted tools for analyzing these flows. Geo-FLUIDS aims at providing image-based methods using physically consistent models to extract meaningful features describing the observed flow and to unveil the dynamical properties of this flow. The main targeted application concerns fluid flows for geophysical sciences.

The project will mainly rely on data assimilation strategies and on motion measurement techniques. From a mathematical point of view, the techniques involved are either stochastic or variational. In this project, the deterministic variational framework will be mainly explored. Nevertheless, we aim at introducing proper uncertainty models built from adequate stochastic processes in order to specify adequately dynamical model errors possibly learned from the data, observation uncertainty and scales disparity occurring between the image data space and the state variables of interest.

Geo-FLUIDS shall combine methodological researches with an ability to conduct proper intensive experimental validations on prototype flows mastered in laboratories, test-based computer turbulent flows, benchmarks constructed from geophysical flow simulation based on routinely used models and real world satellite images. The project consortium will gather three INRIA research groups : • FLUMINANCE with 2 researchers of the INRIA IPSO/ENS Cachan group located in Rennes, this group is the project coordinator •
CLIME located in Rocquencourt, • MOISE located in Grenoble, The "Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique" (LMD) located at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the IFREMER-CERSAT located in Brest and the METEOFRANCE GMAP   research group of CNRM   located in Toulouse. These groups are renowned specialists in data and image assimilation, geophysical flows modeling, image processing, computer vision, computational fluid dynamics, stochastic partial differential equations and numerical integration. One partner has at disposal wind tunnel facilities for experiments. Two groups, Meteo-France and Ifremer, have access to large oceanic and atmopsheric data basis and are specialist of operational assimilation systems.