Articles | Volume 5, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-5-145-1998
© Author(s) 1998. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.30 Sep 1998
30 Sep 1998
Integrable unsteady motion with an application to ocean eddies
Abstract. Application of the Brown-Samelson theorem, which shows that particle motion is integrable in a class of vorticity-conserving, two-dimensional incompressible flows, is extended here to a class of explicit time dependent dynamically balanced flows in multilayered systems. Particle motion for nonsteady two-dimensional flows with discontinuities in the vorticity or potential vorticity fields (modon solutions) is shown to be integrable. An example of a two-layer modon solution constrained by observations of a Gulf Stream ring system is discussed.