Three Kinds of Butterfly Effects within Lorenz Models
Bo‐Wen Shen, Roger A. Pielke, Xubin Zeng, Jialin Cui, Sara Faghih-Naini, Wei Paxson, Robert Atlas
Abstract
Within Lorenz models, the three major kinds of butterfly effects (BEs) are the sensitive dependence on initial conditions (SDIC), the ability of a tiny perturbation to create an organized circulation at large distances, and the hypothetical role of small-scale processes in contributing to finite predictability, referred to as the first, second, and third kinds of butterfly effects (BE1, BE2, and BE3), respectively. A well-accepted definition of the butterfly effect is the BE1 with SDIC, which was rediscovered by Lorenz in 1963. In fact, the use of the term “butterfly” appeared in a conference presentation by Lorenz in 1972, when Lorenz introduced the BE2 as the metaphorical butterfly effect. In 2014, the so-called “real butterfly effect”, which is based on the features of Lorenz’s study in 1969, was introduced as the BE3.