A Note on “Internal Waves in a Randomly Stratified Fluid”

Abstract

We show that in the presence of a randomly perturbed stability frequency, a coherent internal wave (f<σ<N0) or gyroscopic wave (N0<σ<f) is always attenuated in the direction of energy propagation, where σ and f denote respectively the wave angular frequency and Coriolis parameter, and N0 denotes the mean stability frequency. For internal waves, the vertical e-folding attenuation scale due to the random perturbations is estimated to be 1?2 km. The effect of the random perturbations on the wave phase and group velocities appears to be insignificant, however.