On the order of magnitude of the baroclinic flow in the primitive equations of the ocean (Q2504900)

This paper deals with mathematical modelling and numerical simulations of large- and mesoscale ocean flows. Such flows differ in many aspects from engineering flows. Earth rotation, variable fluid properties, and different space and time scales must be taken into account. The paper may be divided into three interrelated parts. First, the authors give a concise overview of the main characteristics of ocean flow processes and of the partial differential equations which govern such processes. In oceanography, versions of Navier-Stokes equations describing hydrodynamical flows on the sphere under the assumption that vertical motion is much smaller than the horizontal motion and that the depth of the fluid layer is small compared to the radius of the sphere, are called primitive equations (PEs). For the numerical solution of the PEs, the barotropic-baroclinic formulation is used. It is a decomposition of the horizontal velocity \({\mathbf v}=(u,v)\) into a vertical average flow \(\bar{ {\mathbf v}} \) -- called barotropic flow and the difference \(\bar{\mathbf v}^b=v- \bar{v}\) called baroclinic flow. For more details, the authors refer to the literature given at the end of the paper. The second part is the main mathematical contribution of this work. Here, proofs are presented that, for the case of continuous density stratification and for the case of double diffusion (temperature and salinity), the magnitude of the baroclinic flow in the \(L^2\)-norm is of order \(O(\delta)\), where the small parameter \(\delta\) is the aspect ratio between the vertical and horizontal extension of the ocean. In the third part, analytical estimates of the order of the baroclinic flow of PEs with continuous density stratification are found to be in agreement with numerical simulations. Also, some results of double-gyre numerical simulations are presented.