Small amplitude steady internal waves in stratified fluids

Abstract

We study the weakly non linear solutions of theDubreil-Jacotin—Long elliptic equation in a strip, which describes two dimensional gravity internal waves propagating steadily in a stratified fluid. In the neighborhood of the first critical value of the Froude number, the center manifold theorem ensures that small solutions are parametrized by two coordinates which verify a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. We compute numerically the coefficients of the normal form of this reduced system for a three parameters family of stratifications and show that the quadratic coefficient (the most important) may become small. In that case, nonusual waves such as fronts can propagate. The last part of our work studies the case when a smooth stratification converges towards a piecewise constant profile having one discontinuity. We observe formally that the small waves which propagate at the interface of two homogeneous fluids are limits at leading order of waves travelling in the region where the smooth density varies rapidly.