An explicit method to determine Casimirs in 2D geophysical flows

Abstract

Conserved quantities in geophysical flows play an important role in the characterisation of geophysical dynamics and aid the development of structure-preserving numerical methods. A significant family of conserved quantities is formed by the Casimirs i.e., integral conservation laws that are in the kernel of the underlying Poisson bracket. The Casimirs hence determine the geometric structure of the geophysical fluid equations among which the enstrophy is well known. Often Casimirs are proposed on heuristic grounds and later verified to be part of the kernel of the Poisson bracket. In this work, we will explicitly construct Casimirs by rewriting the Poisson bracket in vorticity-divergence coordinates thereby providing explicit construction of Casimirs for 2D geophysical flow dynamics.