Efficiency of mixing, resulting from the reflection of an internal wave field imposed on
the oscillatory background flow with a three-dimensional bottom topography, is
investigated using a linear approximation. The radiating wave field is associated with the
spectrum of the linear model, which consists of those mode numbers n and slope values
α, for
which the solution represents the internal waves of frequencies ω =
nω0 radiating upwrad of
the topography, where ω0 is the fundamental frequency at which
internal waves are generated at the topography. The effects of the bottom topography and
the earth’s rotation on the spectrum is analyzed analytically and numerically in the
vicinity of the critical slope
αn,θc = arcsin (n2ω02-f2 / N2-f2) 1/2
which is a slope with the same angle to the horizontal as the internal wave
characteristic. In this notation, θ is latitude, f is the Coriolis parameter
and N is the
buoyancy frequency, which is assumed to be a constant, which corresponds to the uniform
stratification.