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Updated: May 10, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
On strongly interacting internal waves in a rotating ocean and coupled Ostrovsky equations
A Alias1, R H J Grimshaw, K R Khusnutdinova
1Department of Mathematics, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, 21030 Terengganu, Malaysia.
Abstract:
In the weakly nonlinear limit, oceanic internal solitary waves for a single linear long wave mode are described by the KdV equation, extended to the Ostrovsky equation in the presence of background rotation. In this paper we consider the scenario when two different linear long wave modes have nearly coincident phase speeds and show that the appropriate model is a system of two coupled Ostrovsky equations. These are systematically derived for a density-stratified ocean. Some preliminary numerical simulations are reported which show that, in the generic case, initial solitary-like waves are destroyed and replaced by two coupled nonlinear wave packets, being the counterpart of the same phenomenon in the single Ostrovsky equation.
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