Transport in rotating fluids

Abstract

We consider uniformly rotating incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. We study the suppression of vertical gradients of Lagrangian displacement ("vertical" refers to the direction of the rotation axis). We employ a formalism that relates the total vorticity to the gradient of the back-to-labels map (the inverse Lagrangian map, for inviscid flows, a diffusive analogue for viscous flows). We obtain bounds for the vertical gradients of the Lagrangian displacement that vanish linearly with the maximal local Rossby number. Consequently, the change in vertical separation between fluid masses carried by the flow vanishes linearly with the maximal local Rossby number.