Baroclinic instability

Boundary currents like the Alaskan Coastal Current shown below, Mid-Atlantic Bight Shelf-break front, Soya warm current, etc could develop baroclinic instability along their boundaries. These instabilities on shallow shelves are influenced by a number of processes, including non-geostrophic basic flow (i.e. balanced Richardson number Ri of O(1)), bottom drag, bottom slope, finite width, etc. The complexity had motivated us to examine the individual effects. It was shown that the individual effects on scale selection could be interpreted in terms of top-bottom Rossby wave interactions, with drag and slope modifying the propagation of bottom waves. Some results are described in a poster below for the Gordon Research Conference in 2019. Details can be found in Chen et al. (2020)