Existence of a conjugate point in the incompressible Euler flow on an ellipsoid

Abstract

Existence of a conjugate point in the incompressible Euler flow on a sphere and an ellipsoid is considered. Misiolek (1996) formulated a differential-geometric criterion (we call M-criterion) for the existence of a conjugate point in a fluid flow. In this paper, it is shown that no zonal flow (stationary Euler flow) satisfies M-criterion if the background manifold is a sphere, on the other hand, there are zonal flows satisfy M-criterion if the background manifold is an ellipsoid (even it is sufficiently close to the sphere). The conjugate point is created by the fully nonlinear effect of the inviscid fluid flow with differential geometric mechanism.