Internal gravity waves: from instabilities to turbulence Chantal Staquet, Joël Sommeria To cite this version: Chantal Staquet, Joël Sommeria. Internal gravity waves: from instabilities to turbulence. Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Annual Reviews, 2002, 34, pp.559-593. 10.1146/an- nurev.fluid.34.090601.130953. hal-00264617 HAL Id: hal-00264617 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00264617 Submitted on 4 Feb 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License INTERNAL GRAVITY WAVES: From Instabilities to Turbulence C. Staquet and J. Sommeria Laboratoire des Ecoulements Geophysiques´ et Industriels, BP 53, 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9, France; e-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Key Words geophysical fluid dynamics, stratified fluids, wave interactions, wave breaking Abstract We review the mechanisms of steepening and breaking for internal gravity waves in a continuous density stratification. After discussing the instability of a plane wave of arbitrary amplitude in an infinite medium at rest, we consider the steep- ening effects of wave reflection on a sloping boundary and propagation in a shear flow. The final process of breaking into small-scale turbulence is then presented.