The role of the complete Coriolis force in weakly stratified oceanic flows

Marine Tort1, Kraig B Winters1, Bruno Ribstein2 and Vladimir Zeitlin3, (1)University of California San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, United States, (2)Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany, (3)Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique ENS, Paris, France
Abstract:
Ocean dynamics is usually described using the primitive equations based on the so-called traditional approximation (TA), where the Coriolis force associated with the horizontal component of the planetary rotation is neglected (also called non-traditional (NT) part proportional to cosΦ, see Fig 1.). However, recent studies have shown that the NT part of the Coriolis force plays a non-negligible dynamical role in some particular oceanic flows (see Gerkema et al., 2008 for an extensive review of NT effects for geophysical and astrophysical flows).

Here we explore the relevance of including the NT component of the Coriolis force in ocean models, by presenting particular results regarding two different mid-latitude flow configurations after relaxing the TA:

  • Propagation of wind-induced near-inertial waves (NIWs). Under the TA, NIWs propagate toward the equator, the inertially poleward propagation being internally reflected at a depth-independent critical latitude. The combined effects of the NT Coriolis force and weak stratification in the deep ocean leads to the existence of waveguides for sub-inertial waves, which get trapped and propagate further poleward (Winters et al., 2011). Here we consider storm-induced NIWs and their evolution in a non-linear Boussinesq model on the β-plane in the NT approximation. Preliminary results are presented concerning the behavior of the waves in a weakly stratified mixed-layer, where NT effects are expected to be significant. 
  • Inertial instability. A detailed linear stability analysis of the Bickley jet at large Rossby numbers in the NT approximation on the f-plane is performed for long waves in a continuously stratified Boussinesq model. For a sufficiently weak stratification, both symmetric and asymmetric inertial instabilities have substantially higher growth rates than in the TA while no discernible differences between the two approximations are observed for strong enough stratifications (Tort et al., 2015). 

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