On the shape and breaking of finite amplitude internal gravity waves in a shear flow

Abstract

This paper is concerned with two important aspects of nonlinear internal gravity waves in a stably stratified inviscid plane shear flow, their shape and their breaking, particularly in conditions which are frequently encountered in geophysical applications when the vertical gradients of the horizontal current and the density are concentrated in a fairly narrow depth interval (e.g. the thermocline in the ocean). The present theoretical and experimental study of the wave shape extends earlier work on waves in the absence of shear and shows that the shape may be significantly altered by shear, the second-harmonic terms which describe the wave profile changing sign when the shear is increased sufficiently in an appropriate sense.In the second part of the paper we show that the slope of internal waves at which breaking occurs (the particle speeds exceeding the phase speed of the waves) may be considerably reduced by the presence of shear. Internal waves on a thermocline which encounter an increasing shear, perhaps because of wind action accelerating the upper mixing layer of the ocean, may be prone to such breaking.This work may alternatively be regarded as a study of the stability of a parallel stratified shear flow in the presence of a particular finite disturbance which corresponds to internal gravity waves propagating horizontally in the plane of the flow.