Autoregressive multiplier bootstrap for in-situ error estimation and quality monitoring of finite time averages in turbulent flow simulations

In Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and particularly within Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES), the computational cost is largely dictated by the effort required to obtain statistically converged quantities such as time-averaged fields and higher-order moments. Despite the importance of accurately quantifying statistical uncertainty in unsteady simulations, no continuous and cost-effective, on-line method currently exists for monitoring the convergence quality of such statistics during runtime. This work introduces a novel, fully on-line bootstrapping approach to estimate the variance of finite-time averages without requiring the estimation of the flow's Auto-Correlation Function (ACF). Unlike existing methods that rely on ACF estimation, which are often impractical due to excessive storage demands in large-scale simulations, or require off-line processing or a priori modeling assumptions, our method operates entirely during the simulation and incurs minimal overhead. The proposed technique employs a recursive update of bootstrap replicates of the time average, using correlated random weights generated via an autoregressive model. This formulation is computationally efficient: the update cost scales linearly with the number of bootstrap replicates and the dimensionality of the flow field, and the autoregressive model is inexpensive to evaluate. The method only requires storage of a small number of fields, making it suitable for large-scale CFD applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on synthetic data from the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process and on two canonical LES cases: a turbulent pipe flow and a round jet. We further discuss the method's applicability to simulations with non-uniform time stepping, highlighting its flexibility and robustness.