Generalized Clebsch Variables for Compressible Ideal Fluids: Initial Conditions and Approximations of the Hamiltonian

Abstract

Clebsch variables provide a canonical representation of ideal flows that is, in practice, difficult to handle: while the velocity field is a function of the Clebsch variables and their gradients, constructing the Clebsch variables from the velocity field is not trivial. We introduce an extended set of Clebsch variables that circumvents this problem. We apply this method to a compressible, chemically inhomogeneous, and rotating ideal fluid in a gravity field. A second difficulty, the secular growth of canonical variables even for stationary states of stratified fluids, makes expansions of the Hamiltonian in Clebsch variables problematic. We give a canonical transformation that associates a stationary state of the canonical variables with the stationary state of the fluid; the new set of variables permits canonical approximations of the dynamics. We apply this to a compressible stratified ideal fluid with the aim to facilitate forthcoming studies of wave turbulence of internal waves.