Internal ring waves in a three-layer fluid over a linear shear current

Abstract

Oceanic internal waves often have curvilinear fronts and propagate over various currents. We present the first study of long weakly-nonlinear internal ring waves in a three-layer fluid in the presence of a background linear shear current. The leading order of this theory leads to the angular adjustment equation - a nonlinear first-order differential equation describing the dependence of the linear long wave speed on the angle to the direction of the current. Ring waves correspond to singular solution (envelope of the general solution) of this equation, and they can exist only under certain conditions. The constructed solutions reveal qualitative differences in the shapes of the wavefronts of the two baroclinic modes: the wavefront of the faster mode is elongated in the direction of the current, while the wavefront of the slower mode is squeezed. Moreover, different regimes are identified according to the vorticity strength. When the vorticity is weak, part of the wavefront is able to propagate upstream. However, when the vorticity is strong enough, the whole wavefront propagates downstream. A richer behaviour can be observed for the slower mode. As the vorticity increases, singularities of the swallowtail-type may arise and, eventually, solutions with compact wavefronts crossing the downstream axis cease to exist. We show that the latter is related to the long-wave instability of the base flow. We obtain analytical expressions for the coefficients of the cKdV-type amplitude equation, and numerically model the evolution of the waves for both modes. The initial evolution is in agreement with the leading-order predictions for the deformations of the wavefronts. Then, as the wavefronts expand, strong dispersive effects in the upstream direction are revealed. Moreover, when nonlinearity is enhanced, fission of waves can occur in the upstream part of the ring waves.