Transport in Rotating Fluids

Abstract

We consider uniformly rotating incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. We study the suppression of vertical gradients of Lagrangian displacement ("vertical" refers to the direction of the rotation axis). We employ a formalism that relates the total vorticity to the gradient of the back-to-labels map (the inverse Lagrangian map, for inviscid flows, a diffusive analogue for viscous flows). The results include a nonlinear version of the Taylor-Proudman theorem: in a steady solution of the rotating Euler equations, two fluid material points which were initially on a vertical vortex line, will perpetually maintain their vertical separation unchanged. For more general situations, including unsteady flows, we obtain bounds for the vertical gradients of the Lagrangian displacement that vanish linearly with the maximal local Rossby number.