Surface gravity waves propagating in a rotating frame: the Ekman-Stokes instability

TL;DR

This paper investigates an instability in surface gravity waves within a rotating frame, revealing how wave-induced flows can become unstable and lead to complex cellular patterns, with implications for oceanic particle dispersion.

Contribution

It introduces a new instability mechanism driven by Stokes drift and rotation, analyzing its threshold through numerical and asymptotic methods across different Ekman number regimes.

Findings

The instability threshold is determined by the Rossby and Ekman numbers.

At large E, the instability resembles a standard Ekman spiral driven by surface stress.

At low E, the Stokes drift profile shapes the unstable mode.

Abstract

We report on an instability arising when surface gravity waves propagate in a rotating frame. The Stokes drift associated to the uniform wave field, together with global rotation, drives a mean flow in the form of a horizontally invariant Ekman-Stokes spiral. We show that the latter can be subject to an instability that triggers the appearance of an additional horizontally-structured cellular flow. We determine the instability threshold numerically, in terms of the Rossby number Ro associated to the Stokes drift of the waves and the Ekman number E. We confirm the numerical results through asymptotic expansions at both large and low Ekman number. At large E the instability reduces to that of a standard Ekman spiral driven by the wave-induced surface stress instead of a wind stress, while at low E the Stokes-drift profile crucially determines the shape of the unstable mode. In both limits the instability threshold asymptotes to an Ekman-number-independent critical Rossby number, which in both cases also corresponds to a critical Reynolds number associated to the Lagrangian base-flow velocity profile. Parameter values typical of ocean swell fall into the low-E unstable regime: the corresponding "anti-Stokes" flows are unstable, with possible consequences for particle dispersion and mixing.