On the quasi-geostrophic dynamics of a stratified two-component medium: The ocean

Abstract

The quasi-geostrophic dynamics of a stratified two-component medium (salty sea water) are described by formulating a closed system of equations containing the temperature and salinity among the sought field variables. The corresponding system consists of the conservation laws of two Lagrange invariants, namely, the quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity and some “thermodynamic” invariant playing the role of a passive tracer. The temperature and salinity fields determined from the values of these invariants are separated into the density and density-compensated parts. In this case, the density part participates immediately in the dynamics, while the density-compensated part is simply transferred by the geostrophic velocity filed with no contribution to the density field. The system thus formulated is used to describe a number of specific features in the dynamics of thermohaline disturbances in zonal geostrophic flows. These features include the sharp-ening of the spatial gradients of the density-compensated distributions in shear currents and breaking of the initial temperature disturbance into two (density and density-compensated) wave packets propagating with different velocities.