Do Rossby-wave critical layers absorb, reflect, or over-reflect?

The Stewartson-Warn-Warn (SWW) solution for the time evolution of an inviscid, nonlinear Rossby-wave critical layer, which predicts that the critical layer will alternate between absorbing and over-reflecting states as time goes on, is shown to be hydrodynamically unstable. The instability is a two-dimensional shear instability, owing its existence to a local reversal of the cross-stream absolute vorticity gradient within the long, thin Kelvin cat’s eyes of the SWW streamline pattern. The unstable condition first develops while the critical layer is still an absorber, well before the first over-reflecting stage is reached. The exponentially growing modes have a two-scale cross-stream structure like that of the basic SWW solution. They are found analytically using the method of matched asymptotic expansions, enabling the problem to be reduced to a transcendental equation for the complex eigenvalue. Growth rates are of the order of the inner vorticity scale Sq, i.e. the initial absolute vorticity gradient dq,/dy times the critical-layer width scale. This is much faster than the time evolution of the SWW solution itself, albeit much slower than the shear rate du,/dy of the basic flow. Nonlinear saturation of the growing instability is expected to take place in a central region of width comparable to the width of the SWW cat’s-eye pattern, probably leading to chaotic motion there, with very large ‘eddy-viscosity ’ values. Those values correspond to critical-layer Reynolds numbers A-’ Q 1, suggesting that for most initial conditions the time evolution of the critical layer will depart drastically from that predicted by the SWW solution. A companion paper (Haynes 1985) establishes that the instability can, indeed, grow to large enough amplitudes for this to happen. The simplest way in which the instability could affect the time evolution of the critical layer would be to prevent or reduce the oscillations between over-reflecting and absorbing states which, according to the SWW solution, follow the first onset of perfect reflection. The possibility that absorption (or over-reflection) might be prolonged indefinitely is ruled out, in many cases of interest (even if the ‘eddy viscosity’ is large), by the existence of a rigorous, general upper bound on the magnitude of the time-integrated absorptivity a(t). The bound is uniformly valid for all time t . The absorptivity a(t) is defined aa the integral over all past t of the jump in the wave-induced Reynolds stress across the critical layer. In typical cases the bound implies that, no matter how large t may become, I a(t) I cannot greatly exceed the rate of absorption predicted by linear theory multiplied by the timescale on which linear theory breaks down, say the time for the cat’s-eye flow to twist up the absolute vorticity contours by about half a turn. An alternative statement is that I a(t) I cannot greatly exceed the initial absolute vorticity gradient dq,/dy times the cube of the