Prospects and limitations of conditional averaging

The detection of large-scale structures in broadband turbulence is a recent task in neutral fluids and plasma physics. Conditional averaging is one of the most commonly used methods for this purpose. In this paper, the prospects and limitations of conditional averaging are systematically investigated. By means of an analytic model, synthetic and experimental data, the reliability of the conditional averaging method to resolve amplitudes and phase shifts of density and potential structures embedded in a noisy background are discussed.