Experimental study of the effect of rotation on nonlinear internal waves

Abstract

Large amplitude internal waves are commonly observed in the coastal ocean. In the weakly nonlinear long wave r egime, they are often modeled by the Korteweg-de Vries equation, which predicts that the long-time outcome of generic localised initial conditions is a train of internal solitary waves. However, when the e ect of background rotation is taken into account, it is known from several theoretical and numerical studies that the formation of solitary waves is inhibited, and instead nonlinear wave packets form. In this paper, we report the results from a laboratory experiment on the Coriolis platform which describes this process.