INTERNAL GRAVITY WAVES: From Instabilities to Turbulence

By C. Staquet, J. Sommeria. 2002

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

▪ Abstract We review the mechanisms of steepening and breaking for internal gravity waves in a continuous density stratification. After discussing the instability of a plane wave of arbitrary amplitude in an infinite medium at rest, we consider the steepening effects of wave reflection on a sloping boundary and propagation in a shear flow. The final process of breaking into small-scale turbulence is then presented. The influence of those processes upon the fluid medium by mean flow changes is discussed. The specific properties of wave turbulence, induced by wave-wave interactions and breaking, are illustrated by comparative studies of oceanic and atmospheric observations, as well as laboratory and numerical experiments. We then review the different attempts at a statistical description of internal gravity wave fields, whether weakly or strongly interacting.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e842a7fa68eeef0a406ab4b38d7dbce22cb1f62d

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Citations in the corpus

Density Stratification, Turbulence, but How Much Mixing? (2008, background): “The field is large, and we refer the reader to the recent reviews of related subjects by Riley & Lelong (2000), Staquet & Sommeria (2002), and Baumert et al. (2005).”
VERTICAL MIXING, ENERGY, AND THE GENERAL CIRCULATION OF THE OCEANS (2004, background): “M¨uller et al. (1986) and Staquet & Sommeria (2002) provide useful reviews.”
On internal wave breaking and tidal dissipation near the centre of a solar-type star (2010, background): “This process transfers energy to the secondary waves, whose steepness can then grow beyond the critical value required for breaking to occur, even though the primary steepness may not be sufficient for breaking on its own (Staquet & Sommeria 2002).”
Review of wave‐turbulence interactions in the stable atmospheric boundary layer (2015, background): “WAVE-TURBULENCE INTERACTIONS 961 Interactions of nonlinear waves in an inviscid flow can also lead to waves with a wide range of frequencies and wave numbers, and their spectra resemble turbulence spectra; i.e., they display inertial ranges with specific laws [e.g., Staquet and Sommeria, 2002].”
Wave capture and wave–vortex duality (2005, result): “…derivatives are negligible, so in this respect the present example differs from the generic three-dimensional scenario considered earlier and is more similar to well-known examples of horizontal critical layers (see J69, BS93, and references in Staquet & Sommeria 2002). follows from (2.7).”