Tidally generated internal-wave attractors between double ridges
A study is presented of the generation of internal tides by barotropic tidal flow over topography in the shape of a double ridge. An iterative map is constructed to expedite the search for the closed ray paths that form wave attractors in this geometry. The map connects the positions along a ray pat...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
2013
|
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79126 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7639-0194 |
| Summary: | A study is presented of the generation of internal tides by barotropic tidal flow over topography in the shape of a double ridge. An iterative map is constructed to expedite the search for the closed ray paths that form wave attractors in this geometry. The map connects the positions along a ray path of consecutive reflections from the surface, which is double-valued owing to the presence of both left- and right-going waves, but which can be made into a genuine one-dimensional map using a checkerboarding algorithm. Calculations are then presented for the steady-state scattering of internal tides from the barotropic tide above the double ridges. The calculations exploit a Green function technique that distributes sources along the topography to generate the scattering, and discretizes in space to calculate the source density via a standard matrix inversion. When attractors are present, the numerical procedure appears to fail, displaying no convergence with the number of grid points used in the spatial discretizations, indicating a failure of the Green function solution. With the addition of dissipation into the problem, these difficulties are avoided, leading to convergent numerical solutions. The paper concludes with a comparison between theory and a laboratory experiment. |
|---|