Resonant over-reflection of internal gravity waves from a thin shear layer

Abstract

In a previous paper (Grimshaw 1979) the resonant over-reflection of internal gravity waves from a vortex sheet was considered in the weakly nonlinear regime. It was shown there that the time evolution of the amplitude of the vortex sheet displacement was balanced by a cubic nonlinearity. For one vortex sheet mode, symmetrical with respect to the interface, it was shown that a steady finite-amplitude wave was possible. For the other, asymmetric modes, a singularity develops in a finite time. In the present paper, that analysis is extended by replacing the vortex sheet with a thin shear layer of thickness α², where α is the amplitude of the shear layer displacement. The effect of this extension is to introduce a linear growth rate term in the amplitude equation, which is otherwise unaltered. The linear growth rate can be computed from a formula due to Drazin & Howard (1966, p. 67). The effect on the modes is that the symmetric mode is linearly damped and requires sustained forcing to be observed, while the asymmetric modes are slightly destabilized by the linear term and, as in the vortex-sheet model, develop a singularity in finite time.