A study on the nonlinear stability of fronts in the ocean on a sloping continental shelf

Abstract

The baroclinic nonlinear stability of fronts in the ocean on a sloping continental shelf is studied, the model equations, called the frontal geostrophic model, developed by Cushman—Roisin et al.(1992) for describing the dynamics of surface density fronts in the ocean are developed and the two—layer frontal geostrophic model for fronts on a sloping continental shelf is first obtained. The nonlinear stability criteria for the fronts on a sloping bottom are obtained by using Arnol’d (1965, 1969) variational principle and a prior estimate method. It is shown that our result is better than the former works.