Equatorial solitary waves Part 4. Kelvin solitons in a shear flow

Abstract

It is shown that a mean flow with shear makes the Kelvin wave dispersive. This in turn modifies its nonlinear behavior and makes it necessary to replace the one-dimensional advection equation derived in an earlier work of the author's by the Korteweg-deVries equation instead. The frontogenesis predicted in the earlier paper will still occur, but the wave breaking will not. Instead, once a steep front has formed, it will disintegrate into a train of solitary waves. These then propagate towards the east at a faster-than-linear rate. It is also shown that Kelvin solitary waves will have much smaller zonal widths than Rossby solitons of the same height; “round” Kelvin solitary waves (equal zonal and latitudinal width) are to be expected, and are fully consistent with the small amplitude, weak dispersion theory. An interesting implication of the Korteweg-deVries model is that the peak signal from a nonlinear Kelvin wave packet may be roughly double that of a linear Kelvin wavetrain.