This paper furthers existing work into the instability mechanisms within the boundary-layer flow over a rotating sphere through the study of amplification rates within the convectively-unstable region. The onset of convective instability is associated with the experimentally observed onset of spiral vortices reported in the literature. Axial flow is found to stabilize the boundary layer by both...

The absolute/convective character of the linear instability of axisymmetric jets is investigated for a wide range of parallel velocity and density profiles. An adjoint-based sensitivity analysis is carried out in order to maximize the absolute growth rate of jet profiles with and without density variations. It is demonstrated that jets without counterflow may display absolute instability at den...

A linear stability analysis of the parallel uniform flow in a horizontal channel with open upper boundary is carried out. The lower boundary is considered as an impermeable isothermal wall, while the open upper boundary is subject to a uniform heat flux and it is exposed to an external horizontal fluid stream driving the flow. An eigenvalue problem is obtained for the two-dimensional transverse...

The stability of dark solitons generated by supersonic flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate past an obstacle is investigated. It is shown that in the reference frame attached to the obstacle a transition occurs at some critical value of the flow velocity from absolute instability of dark solitons to their convective instability. This leads to the decay of disturbances of solitons at a fixed dista...

We study the nature of the instability of the homogeneous steady states of the subcritical Ginzburg-Landau equation in the presence of group velocity. The shift of the absolute instability threshold of the trivial steady state, induced by the destabilizing cubic nonlinearities, is confirmed by the numerical analysis of the evolution of its perturbations. It is also shown that the dynamics of th...

We review what is known about the convective process in the open ocean, in which the properties of large volumes of water are changed by intermittent, deep-reaching convection, triggered by winter storms. Observational, laboratory, and modeling studies reveal a fascinating and complex interplay of convective and geostrophic scales, the large-scale circulation of the ocean, and the prevailing me...

We describe progress in classifying the convective instability characteristics of the boundarylayer flow over the family of rotating cones. Existing experimental and theoretical studies are discussed which lead to the clear hypothesis of a centrifugal instability mode that dominates over slender cones and manifests as Görtler-type spiral vortices. Although a formulation consistent with the clas...

The propagation of transient inertio-gravity waves in a shear flow is examined using the Gaussian beam formulation. This formulation assumes Gaussian wavepackets in the spectral space and uses a second-order Taylor expansion of the phase of the wave field. In this sense, the Gaussian beam formulation is also an asymptotic approximation like spatial ray tracing; however, the first one is free of...

In continuously stratified fluid, vertically propagating internal gravity waves of moderately large amplitude can become unstable and possibly break due to a variety of mechanisms including with some overlap modulational instability, parametric subharmonic instability PSI , self-acceleration, overturning, and convective instability. In PSI, energy from primary waves is transferred, for example,...

We examine the convective core helium burning phase of intermediate mass stars, and investigate the role of coupling of nuclear burning and mixing on the extension and duration of the blue loop phase. We compare the theoretical scenario with the distribution of stars in the colour-magnitude (CM) diagram of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) cluster NGC1866, whose largely populated clump of He-bur...