2022/05/17 by Marcelo V. Flamarion, Flamarion, Marcelo V., Roberto Ribeiro‐Jr +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn) #Ocean Waves and Remote Sensing #Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes #Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.08344
openalex publication_date 2022/05/17 · openalex created_date 2022/05/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
While several articles have been written on water waves on flows with constant vorticity, little is known about the extent to which a nonconstant vorticity affects the flow structure, such as the appearance of stagnation points. In order to shed light on this topic, we investigate in detail the flow beneath solitary waves propagating on an exponentially decaying sheared current. Our focus is to analyse numerically the emergence of stagnation points. For this purpose, we approximate the velocity field within the fluid bulk through the classical Korteweg-de Vries asymptotic expansion and use the Matlab language to evaluate the resulting streamfunction. Our findings suggest that the flow beneath the waves can have zero, one or two stagnation points in the fluid body. We also study the bifurcation between these flows. Our simulations indicate that the stagnation points emerge from a streamline with a sharp corner.