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Rossby adjustment over a slope in a homogeneous fluid.

American Meteorological Society

The adjustment of ocean currents initially travelling over a topographic change in depth has previously been investigated in the limit of a discontinuous depth change. The present work is an extension to a linear, continuous depth change. Differences in the time-dependent flow are shown to follow from the different properties of double Kelvin waves over steps and slopes. Over a slope, double Kelvin waves have a series of cross-slope modes and cam have group speeds in both directions along the slope. Thus, energy propagates both ways along the slope. The steady state over a linear slope is argued to he similar to that for a step escarpment. The slope separates the streamlines, isolating the flow on the two sides of the slope. The results of a series of numerical experiments are given in order to describe the transient flow and to examine the effect of varying the two governing parameters: the nondimensional gradient of the slope and the nondimensional slope width. The slope gradient is found to define the timescale of formation of the tongue and the slope width to define the cross-sectional shape. Copyright 1996 of publication] American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or copyright@ametsoc.org.

Text

2011-05-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/34547

Allen, Susan E. 1996. Rossby adjustment over a slope in a homogeneous fluid. Journal of Physical Oceanography 26(8) 1646-1654

Faculty

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/