| Abstract: | Laboratory experiments concerning the nature of density fronts in a two-layer fluid in the vicinity of a continuous ridge were conducted. The experiments were carried out in a circular rotating test cell containing an annular ridge of uniform cross-section. The density fronts were established by releasing a lighter fluid contained in a bottomless cylinder in the interior of the region defined by the topography into a heavier fluid occupying the rest of the test cell. The system was also equipped with an oscillating plunger located along the test cell axis to produce simulated tidal currents impinging in the normal direction on the ridge; experiments without and with tidal forcing were conducted. The governing parameters for the physical system considered are the Rossby, temporal Rossby, Burger and Ekman numbers and geometrical parameters. It is found that for both the non-forced and tidally forced experiments the fronts were stabilized by the ridge. The fronts in the simulated tidal currents experiments were found to advect radially outward more rapidly at early times than their non-forced counterparts; at large times, the temporal evolution of the front for these forced experiments approached that of the non-forced experiments. In the region interior to the annular ridge, the motion field is highly baroclinic, while outside this region, the flow response at the forcing frequency is barotropic. Scaling arguments regarding frontal position, viscous decay and barotropic oscillatory flow responses are advanced and supported by experimental observations. |
