A study on the nonlinear stability of fronts in the ocean on a sloping continental shelf

The baroclinic nonlinear stability of fronts in the ocean on a sloping continental shelf is studied, the model equations, called the frontal geostrophic model, developed by Cushman-Roisin et al. (1992) for des-cribing the dynamics of surface density fronts in the ocean are developed and the two-layer frontal geostrophic model for fronts on a sloping continental shelf is first obtained. The nonlinear stability criteria for the fronts on a sloping bottom are obtained by using Arnol'd (1965, 1969) variational principle and a prior estimate method. It is shown that our result is better than the former works.