Internal gravity wave emission in different dynamical regimes

Abstract

We aim to diagnose internal gravity waves emitted from balanced flow and investigate their role in the downscale transfer of energy. We use an idealized numerical model to simulate a range of baroclinically unstable flows to mimic dynamical regimes ranging from ageostrophic to quasigeostrophic flows. Wavelike signals present in the simulated flows, seen for instance in the vertical velocity, can be related to gravity wave activity identified by frequency and frequency-wavenumber spectra. To explicitly assign the energy contributions to the balanced and unbalanced (gravity) modes, we perform linear and nonlinear modal decomposition to decompose the full state variable into its balanced and unbalanced counterparts. The linear decomposition shows a reasonable separation of the slow and fast modes but is no longer valid when applied to a nonlinear system. To account for the nonlinearity in our system, we apply the normal mode initialization technique proposed by Machenhauer in 1977. Further, we assess the strength of the gravity wave activity and dissipation related to the decomposed modes for different dynamical regimes. We find that gravity wave emission becomes increasingly stronger going from quasigeostrophic to ageostrophic regime. The kinetic energy tied to the unbalanced mode scales close to Ro2 (or Ri-1), with Ro and Ri being the Rossby and Richardson numbers, respectively. Furthermore, internal gravity waves dissipate predominantly through small-scale dissipation, which emphasizes their role in the downscale energy transfer.