Effect of Earth’s rotation on mixing and structure of internal hydraulic jumps in coastal channels
摘要
Internal hydraulic jumps are ubiquitous in the environment in both oceanic and atmospheric settings. They generate intense, localized mixing that can have important effects on the local ecosystem and economy. An improved understanding of their behavior is necessary as engineering interactions with the coastal environment become more frequent and consequential, especially under a changing climate. In this work, the effects of Earth’s rotation on internal hydraulic jumps are numerically investigated using an idealized flow to isolate the effect of rotation, with continuous density and velocity profiles and shear upstream of the jump. Numerical simulations show that the qualitative structure of the jump changes across the width of the channel when rotation is strong, resulting in variation in the amount of mixing that occurs in the jump, which increases towards the side of the domain where the jump is larger and more turbulent. The ability of existing theories to predict the jump size agree quite well with simulations despite variation in the adjacent flow. These results illustrate that cross-channel variation can be significant and should be considered when assessing the behavior of a jump, but existing theories remain useful.