Rigorous justification of the hydrostatic approximation limit of viscous compressible flows

Abstract

This paper considers the asymptotic limit of small aspect ratio between vertical and horizontal spatial scales for viscous isothermal compressible flows. In particular, it is observed that fast vertical acoustic waves arise and induce an averaging mechanism of the density in the vertical variable, which at the limit leads to the hydrostatic approximation of compressible flows, i.e., the compressible primitive equations of atmospheric dynamics. We justify the hydrostatic approximation for general as well as “well-prepared” initial data. The initial data is called well-prepared when it is close to the hydrostatic balance in a strong topology. Moreover, the convergence rate is calculated in the well-prepared initial data case in terms of the aspect ratio, as the latter goes to zero.