Localized error bursts in estimating the state of spatiotemporal chaos

We consider the problem of estimating the current state of an evolving spatiotemporally chaotic system from noisy observations of the system state and a model of the system dynamics. Using a simple scheme for state estimation, we show the possible occurrence of temporally and spatially intermittent large bursts in the estimation error. We discuss the similarity of these bursts with those occurring at the bubbling transition in the synchronization of low dimensional chaotic dynamical systems. We characterize the spatial and temporal behavior of the bursts and investigate how the behavior changes as we vary the number and location of the observations. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.