Mechanism of destruction of transport barriers in geophysical jets with Rossby waves

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Rossby waves can break down transport barriers in geophysical jets, revealing that small amplitude resonances can induce chaos and enhance mixing in oceanic and atmospheric flows.

Contribution

It develops a method to compute invariant curves indicating barrier existence and identifies resonances causing barrier breakdown at small wave amplitudes.

Findings

Resonances break transport barriers at small wave amplitudes.

Chaotic layers form due to specific Rossby wave resonances.

Theoretical predictions align with laboratory experiments.

Abstract

The mechanism of destruction of a central transport barrier in a dynamical model of a geophysical zonal jet current in the ocean or the atmosphere with two propagating Rossby waves is studied. We develop a method for computing a central invariant curve which is an indicator of existence of the barrier. Breakdown of this curve under a variation of the Rossby wave amplitudes and onset of chaotic cross-jet transport happen due to specific resonances producing stochastic layers in the central jet. The main result is that there are resonances breaking the transport barrier at unexpectedly small values of the amplitudes that may have serious impact on mixing and transport in the ocean and the atmosphere. The effect can be found in laboratory experiments with azimuthal jets and Rossby waves in rotating tanks under specific values of the wave numbers that are predicted in the theory.