Geostrophic adjustment near the coast

Geostrophic adjustment of a two-layer fluid near a straight coast is investigated for an initial pressure disturbance which has no closed geostrophic contours by using a reduced gravity (divergent barotropic) model. Propagation of a volume of water along the coast due to the internal Kelvin wave allows a non-zero solution for the final geostrophic state. Energy partitions among geostrophic motion, the internal Kelvin wave and internal Poincaré waves are obtained and compared with the result of the classical problem of geostrophic adjustment without the coast. It is found that energy partition to the geostrophic motion (EPG) with the coast is always smaller than that without the coast (EPG ), while the scale of the initial disturbance is the same. The difference betweenEPG andEPG is smaller than the energy partition to the internal Kelvin waves (EPK) and approachesEPK as the scale of the initial disturbance increases.