Abstract
Abstract The influence of topography on fluid instability has been studied in literature both in the beta-channel approximation and on the sphere mainly using normal modes. A different approach recently proposed is based on the identification of unstable singular vectors (i.e., structures that have the fastest growth over finite-time intervals). Systems characterized by neutral or damped normal modes have been shown to have singular vectors growing (e.g., in terms of kinetic energy) over finite-time intervals. Singular vectors do not conserve their shape during time evolution as normal modes do. Various aspects related to the identification of singular vectors of a barotropic flow are analyzed in this paper, with the final goal of studying the impact of the orography on these structures. First, the author focuses on very idealized situations to verify if neutral and damped flows can sustain structures growing over finite-time intervals. Then, the author studies singular vectors of basic states defined as ...
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