Mountain Waves Produced by a Stratified Shear Flow with a Boundary Layer. Part III: Trapped Lee Waves and Horizontal Momentum Transport

Lee Waves and Mountain Waves ∗

Buoyancy perturbations develop when stably stratified air ascends a mountain barrier. These perturbations often trigger disturbances that propagate away from the mountain as gravity (or buoyancy) waves. Gravity waves triggered by the flow over a mountain are referred to as mountain waves or lee waves. Mountain waves sometimes reveal their presence through dramatic cloud formations, such as smoo...

Lee waves from a sphere in a stratified flow

The dissipation of trapped lee waves . Part II : The relative importance of the 1 boundary layer and the stratosphere

Decaying trapped waves exert a drag on the large-scale flow. The two most studied mechanisms for such decay are boundary-layer dissipation and leakage into the stratosphere. If the waves dissipate in the boundary layer, they exert a drag near the surface, whereas if they leak into the stratosphere, the drag is exerted at the level where the waves dissipate aloft. Although each of these decay me...

The Dissipation of Trapped Lee Waves. Part II: The Relative Importance of the Boundary Layer and the Stratosphere

Decaying trapped waves exert a drag on the large-scale flow. The two most studied mechanisms for such decay are boundary layer dissipation and leakage into the stratosphere. If the waves dissipate in the boundary layer, they exert a drag near the surface, whereas, if they leak into the stratosphere, the drag is exerted at the level where the waves dissipate aloft. Although each of these decay m...

Evolution of a stratified rotating shear layer with horizontal shear. Part 2. Nonlinear evolution

Direct numerical simulation is used to investigate the nonlinear evolution of a horizontally oriented mixing layer with uniform stable stratification and coordinate system rotation about the vertical axis. The important dimensional parameters governing inviscid dynamics are maximum shear S(t), buoyancy frequency N, angular velocity of rotation Ω and characteristic shear thickness L(t). The effe...