Spectral Methods for Coastal-Trapped Waves and Instabilities in a Background Flow

Abstract

Here we present a numerical method for finding non-hydrostatic coastal-trapped wave and instability solutions to the non-hydrostatic Boussinesq equations in the presence of a background flow and complicated coastal topography. We use spectral methods to discretise the two-dimensional eigenvalue problem and solve the resulting discrete problem by standard methods. Our approach is applied to three examples and shown to be consistent with previous numerical and analytical results. In particular, we show that our method is able to reliably identify coastal-trapped wave solutions that correspond to waves seen in realistic simulations of the Southeast Greenland shelf.