Planar intrusions from a narrow, jet-like source in a linearly stratified ambient

Abstract

We present two and three dimensional direct numerical simulations of planar intrusions injected from a continuously supplied, narrow source into a linearly stratified ambient at the level of neutral buoyancy. The evolution passes through three phases. A laminar leading vortex dipole first advances at constant speed with a varicose wave train behind it; the trailing jet then undergoes a sinuous instability whose initial growth rate and wavelength agree with inviscid unstratified planar-jet theory evaluated on the local jet; the flow finally relaxes into a buoyancy-controlled wedge whose area grows linearly in time. Three-dimensional simulations show that the transition remains organized by the planar instability, while three-dimensionality reshapes the near-source region into a slowly evolving, actively mixing zone that entrains an additional twenty to one hundred percent of the source flux depending on source width. Rescaled with this measured effective flux, the downstream intrusion collapses reasonably well onto the similarity solution for a wide-source intrusion.