Geophysical fluid models with simple energy backscatter: explicit flows and unbounded exponential growth

Abstract

Motivated by numerical schemes for large-scale geophysical flow, we consider the rotating shallow water and Boussinesq equations on the whole space with horizontal kinetic energy backscatter source terms built from negative viscosity and stabilising hyperviscosity with constant parameters. We study the impact of this energy input through various explicit flows, which are simultaneously solving the nonlinear equations and the linear equations that arise upon dropping the transport nonlinearity, i.e. the linearisation in the zero state. These include barotropic, parallel and Kolmogorov flows as well as monochromatic inertia gravity waves. With focus on stable stratification, we find that the backscatter generates numerous solutions of this type that grow exponentially and unboundedly, also with vertical structure. This signifies the possibility of undesired energy concentration into specific modes due to the backscatter. Families of steady-state flows of this type arise as well and superposition principles in the nonlinear equations provide explicit sufficient conditions for instability of some of these. For certain steady barotropic flows of this type, we provide numerical evidence of eigenmodes whose growth rates are proportional to the amplitude factor of the flow. For all other arising steady solutions, we prove that this is not possible.

Keywords:

• Explicit flows
• instability
• plane waves
• rotating shallow water equations
• rotating Boussinesq equations

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Marcel Oliver, Gualtiero Badin, Stephan Juricke and Ulrich Achatz for fruitful discussions, and the anonymous reviewers for comments that helped improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is a contribution to the project M2 (Systematic multi-scale modelling and analysis for geophysical flow) of the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 181 “Energy Transfers in Atmosphere and Ocean” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under project number 274762653.