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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
The world’s ocean contains very large islands, e.g. Australia and Greenland. The structure of the circulation around such sub-continents is strongly conditioned by a constraint associated with Kelvin’s Circulation Theorem. Both the steady circulation problem and the time dependent problem are shown to possess unexpected structural features. In the steady problem a recirculation region is forced by the Kelvin constraint. Laboratory experiments demonstrate the effect unequivocally. The application of Kelvin’s theorem to the transmission of Rossby wave energy through gaps in island barriers leads to novel results in which an apparent barrier to transmission is counter-intuitively transformed into an antenna.
Host: Bob Ecke, T-CNLS