This brief summarizes work devoted to studying the linear stability of baroclinic protoplanetary Keplerian disks. This work largely builds on the foundation and fundamental results obtained by Barranco, Marcus & Umurhan (2000) (hereafter BMU) which presented a model to describe structures in weakly baroclinic Keplerian disks. Interest in protoplanetary disks has grown since the discovery of the...

When a stably stratified density interface is embedded in a region of strong velocity shear, hydrodynamic instabilities result. Here we generalize the stratified shear layer to allow an offset between the centre of the shear layer and the density interface. By including this asymmetry, and keeping the density interface thin with respect to the shear layer, the asymmetric Holmboe (AH) instabilit...

The BGK model kinetic equation is applied to spatially inhomogeneous states near steady uniform shear flow. The shear rate of the reference steady state can be large so the states considered include those very far from equilibrium. The single particle distribution function is calculated exactly to first order in the deviations of the hydrodynamic field gradients from their values in the referen...