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Considerations of the stability of certain heterogeneous shear flows including some inflexion-free profiles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2006

George Chimonas
Affiliation:
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, University of Colorado, Boulder

Abstract

We use some well-known properties of the Taylor-Goldstein equation to generate a set of stably stratified shear flows with known singular neutral-mode solutions. The novel feature of the analysis is that it includes such solutions for flows in which, proceeding upwards from a rigid boundary, the Brunt-Väisälä frequency and the flow shear do not change sign and are monotonically decreasing functions of height. Such profiles are much closer to the conditions met in work on the atmospheric boundary layer than the more frequently used inflected flow profiles.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1974 Cambridge University Press

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