Clebsch maps encode velocity fields through functions. These functions contain valuable information about the velocity field. For example, closed integral curves of the associated vorticity field are level lines of the vorticity Clebsch map. This makes Clebsch maps useful for visualization and fluid dynamics analysis. Additionally they can be used in the context of simulations to enhance flows through the introduction of subgrid vorticity. Spherical Clebsch maps turned out to be particularly attractive. Elucidating their geometric structure, it is shown in  that such maps can be found as minimizers of a non-linear Dirichlet energy. To illustrate our approach a number of benchmark problems are used . Code and a video can be found at http://page.math.tu-berlin.de/~chern/projects/Clebsch/ .
Albert Chern, Felix Knöppel, and Peter Pinkall, Ulrich and Schröder.
Inside Fluids: Clebsch Maps for Visualization and Processing.
ACM Trans. Graph., 36(4):142:1–142:11, July 2017.
Albert Chern, Felix Knöppel, Peter Pinkall, Ulrich and Schröder, and Steffen Weißmann.
ACM Trans. Graph., 35:77:1–77:13, July 2016.