Chris, I appreaciate your points. I suspect that Lorenz was speaking of the mathematics of linear systems, which it turns out is limited. My point is merely that many of these questions about fluid dynamics are well understood in simpler situations where it is easier to quantify things including the limitations of models. You would see things where the data is a lot more reliable and the models well understood. And you would see systems where sensitivity to initial conditions is indeed present at all time scales. The simple fact of the matter is that we don’t know the answers to a lot of these questions. We have noisy data or no data at all and we have models that we know are wrong. There is a lot of work to do.
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