  We present a systematic way to analyze and model systems having many
characteristic time-scales. The method we propose is employed for a test-case
of a meandering jet model manifesting chaotic tracer dispersion with long
time-correlations. We first choose a suitable state space partition and analyze
the symbolic dynamics associated to the fluid particle position. In a second
step we construct a stochastic process in terms of a multi-time Markovian
model. This corresponds to a hierarchy of random travelers on a graph where
each traveler moves at his own time scale. The results are compared on the
basis of statistical measures such as entropies and correlation functions.
