Geophysical fluid models with simple energy backscatter: explicit flows and unbounded exponential growth

TL;DR

This paper investigates how energy backscatter in geophysical fluid models can lead to exponential growth of certain flow solutions, highlighting potential instabilities and energy concentration issues.

Contribution

It introduces explicit flow solutions in geophysical models with energy backscatter and analyzes their stability and growth characteristics.

Findings

Backscatter induces unbounded exponential growth in explicit flows.

Steady state solutions can be unstable under certain conditions.

Numerical evidence links flow amplitude to growth rates in specific modes.

Abstract

Motivated by numerical schemes for large scale geophysical flow, we consider the rotating shallow water and Boussinesq equations on the whole space with horizontal kinetic energy backscatter source terms built from negative viscosity and stabilising hyperviscosity with constant parameters. We study the impact of this energy input through various explicit flows, which are simultaneously solving the nonlinear equations and the linear equations that arise upon dropping the transport nonlinearity, i.e. the linearisation in the zero state. These include barotropic, parallel and Kolmogorov flows as well as monochromatic inertia gravity waves. With focus on stable stratification we find that the backscatter generates numerous solutions of this type that grow exponentially and unboundedly, also with vertical structure. This signifies the possibility of undesired energy concentration into specific modes due to the backscatter. Families of steady state flows of this type arise as well and superposition principles in the nonlinear equations provide explicit sufficient conditions for instability of some of these. For certain steady barotropic flows of this type we provide numerical evidence of eigenmodes whose growth rates are proportional to the amplitude factor of the flow. For all other arising steady solutions we prove this is not possible.