Articles | Volume 20, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-20-993-2013
© Author(s) 2013. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.Resonant excitation of coastal Kelvin waves in the two-layer rotating shallow water model
Abstract. Resonant excitation of coastal Kelvin waves by free inertia–gravity waves impinging on the coast is studied in the framework of the simplest baroclinic model: two-layer rotating shallow water with an idealized straight coast. It is shown that, with respect to the previous results obtained with the one-layer model, new resonances leading to a possible excitation of Kelvin waves appear. The most interesting ones, described in the paper, are resonances of a baroclinic inertia–gravity wave with either another wave of this kind, or with a coastal current, leading to generation of a barotropic Kelvin wave. A forced Hopf equation results in any case for the evolution of the Kelvin wave amplitude.