About

Turbulence is the swirling, chaotic motion of air, water, and plasma — and after a century of study, it is still one of the hardest problems in science. Tempest’s goal is to make turbulence predictable. It governs how energy moves, how heat and pollutants spread, and how plasmas behave in extreme environments.

TEMPEST is a Science and Technology Center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. We bring eight institutions, five experimental facilities, and modern machine learning to bear on turbulence in the places it matters most: fusion energy, astrophysics, and hypersonic flight. Progress there takes physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and AI researchers in the same room.

Eight institutions, one instrument

The center is designed so that an experiment run at one campus is a test of a model built at another. Facilities, data standards, and code are shared from the start rather than federated afterwards.

Turbulence is one of the oldest unsolved problems in physics, and for most of that history the honest answer to “can you predict this flow?” has been no — not in a burning plasma, not around a vehicle returning from space, not inside an exploding star.

I think that is finally changing, and not because anyone has had a single brilliant idea. Doing that takes more than one laboratory. These challenges motivated eight institutions to work as one instrument. This is why we share facilities, data, and code from day one rather than after the fact. 

Doing that takes more than one laboratory. It is why eight institutions agreed to work as one instrument, and why we share facilities, data, and code from the first day rather than after the fact.

That is the wager TEMPEST is making. I would be glad to have you follow along.

— Michael S. Murillo