Quasi-geostrophic modes in the Earth's fluid core with an outer stably stratified layer

TL;DR

This study investigates how a stably stratified layer at the Earth's core boundary influences quasi-geostrophic waves, revealing their potential detectability through geomagnetic observations and extending existing theories to core Rossby waves.

Contribution

It numerically characterizes the impact of a stratified layer on core Rossby waves and demonstrates the insensitivity of wave penetration to magnetic fields and stratification details.

Findings

Penetration of waves depends on phase speed and wavelength.

High-frequency modes may be observable in geomagnetic data.

Magnetic fields weakly affect wave behavior in the stratified layer.

Abstract

Seismic waves sensitive to the outermost part of the Earth's liquid core seem to be affected by a stably stratified layer at the core-mantle boundary. Such a layer could have an observable signature in both long-term and short-term variations of the magnetic field of the Earth, which are used to probe the flow at the top of the core. Indeed, with the recent SWARM mission, it seems reasonable to be able to identify waves propagating in the core with period of several months, which may play an important role in the large-scale dynamics. In this paper, we characterize the influence of a stratified layer at the top of the core on deep quasi-geostrophic (Rossby) waves. We compute numerically the quasi-geostrophic eigenmodes of a rapidly rotating spherical shell, with a stably stratified layer near the outer boundary. Two simple models of stratification are taken into account, which are scaled with commonly adopted values of the Brunt-V{\"a}is{\"a}l{\"a} frequency in the Earth's core. In the absence of magnetic field, we find that both azimuthal wavelength and frequency of the eigenmodes control their penetration into the stratified layer: the higher the phase speed, the higher the permeability of the stratified layer to the wave motion. We also show that the theory developed by Takehiro and Lister [2001] for thermal convection extends to the whole family of Rossby waves in the core. Adding a magnetic field, the penetrative behaviour of the quasi-geostrophic modes (the so-called fast branch) is insensitive to the imposed magnetic field and only weakly sensitive to the precise shape of the stratification. Based on these results, the large-scale and high frequency modes (1 to 2 month periods) may be detectable in the geomagnetic data measured at the Earth's surface, especially in the equatorial area where the modes can be trapped.