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A laminar planetary jet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2006

Robert R. Long
Affiliation:
School of Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

A theory of a jet in a rotating, viscous fluid is developed. It is suggested that it may be related to a jet observed in an experiment with a rotating spherical shell of liquid and, in addition, may partly explain the existence of the subsurface equatorial current in the Pacific Ocean. The fundamental physical idea is that of a balance of vorticity brought into the jet by advection and diffused by friction. The necessary approximations are borrowed from boundary-layer theory. The linear case is solved completely and inferences about the non-linear jet are obtained by dimensional reasoning.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1960 Cambridge University Press

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References

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