Multifractal processes in geophysics

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Order and disorder, "cosmos", "chaos" have been deep philosophical and scientific themes since at least the Greeks.  During the 1960's and 70's the discovery that apparently simple nonlinear systems with only three interacting components could generate random-like chaotic behaviour lead to great excitement.  Although twenty five years later the "chaos revolution" has succeeded in changing our scientific outlook, up until now, the promise has been largely illusory: satisfactory physical applications of this deterministic chaos have been disappointingly few in number.  In this proposal, we develop a very different "stochastic" (random) chaos appropriate for systems such as those encountered in the geosphere having huge numbers of interacting components acting over wide ranges of scale. This approach promises to take the revolution a step further.  Particular applications include extreme events, pollution transport, radiation/cloud interactions and volcanic eruptions.