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The effects of rotation on salt fingers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2006

Raymond W. Schmitt  and
Richard B. Lamber
Raymond W. Schmitt
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, Kingston Present address: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543.
Richard B. Lamber
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, Kingston Present address: Science Applications Inc., 8400 Westpark Drive, McLean, Virginia 22101.
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Abstract

The effects of rotation on a salt-fingering interface between two mixed layers are studied experimentally. It is found that rotation causes an interface to thicken more rapidly than it does in the corresponding non-rotating experiment. In order to interpret this result, the collective-instability model of Stern (1969, 1975) is extended to include the Coriolis effect and the neutral-stability condition is derived. Rotation stabilizes the fingers, the degree of stabilization being dependent on the wavenumber of the perturbation. By assuming equal fluxes in the rotating and non-rotating experiments, the interface thickness data are found to be consistent with the extended collective-instability model.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 90 , Issue 3 , 13 February 1979 , pp. 449 - 463
Copyright
© 1979 Cambridge University Press

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