Nonlinear saturation of thermal instabilities

Abstract

Low-frequency simulations of a one-layer model with lateral buoyancy variations (i.e., thermodynamically active) have revealed circulatory motions resembling quite closely submesoscale observations in the surface ocean rather than indefinitely growing in the absence of a high-wavenumber instability cutoff. In this note it is shown that the existence of a convex pseudoenergy--momentum integral of motion for the inviscid, unforced dynamics provides a mechanism for the nonlinear saturation of such thermal instabilities in the zonally symmetric case. The result is an application of \citet{Arnold-66} and \citet{Shepherd-88a} methods.