Random attractor associated with the quasi-geostrophic equation (Q523101)

The authors study the 2D stochastic quasi-geostrophic equation in a periodic domain. The quasi-geostrophic equations occur in geophysical fluid dynamics and usually serve as approximations to the atmospheric and oceanic fluid flows with small Rossby and Ekman numbers (for example, if inertial forces are an order of magnitude smaller than the Coriolis and pressure forces). The equation is parabolic and nonlinear with critical parameter \(\alpha\) (the case \(\alpha=1/2\) is called critical, the cases \(\alpha<1/2\) or \(\alpha>1/2\) are called super-critical or sub-critical, respectively). The driving noise is considered both additive (Section 3) as well as multiplicative (Section 6). The authors prove the existence of a random attractor in the sub-critical case using the exponential decay of the \(L^p\)-norm and a boot-strapping argument. They further prove the upper semi-continuity of random attractors (Section 4) and show that the random attractor is trivial if the viscosity constant \(\kappa\) is large enough (Section 5).