Lee Waves: Benign and Malignant

The flow of an incompressible fluid over an obstacle will produce an oscillation in which buoyancy is the restoring force, called a gravity wave. For disturbances of this scale, the atmosphere may be treated as dynamically incompressible, even though there exists a mean static upward density gradient. Even in the linear approximation—i.e., for small disturbances—this model explains a great many of the flow phenomena observed in the lee of mountains. However, nonlinearities do arise importantly, in three ways: (i) through amplification due to the decrease of mean density with height; (ii) through the large (scaled) size of the obstacle, such as a mountain range; and (iii) from dynamically singular levels in the fluid field. These effects produce a complicated array of phenomena—large departure of the streamlines from their equilibrium levels, high winds, generation of small scales, turbulence, etc.—that present hazards to aircraft and to lee surface areas. The nonlinear disturbances also interact with the larger-scale flow in such a manner as to impact global weather forecasts and the climatological momentum balance. If there is no dynamic barrier, these waves can penetrate vertically into the middle atmosphere (30–100 km), where recent observations show them to be of a length scale that must involve the coriolis force in any modeling. At these altitudes, the amplitude of the waves is very large, and the phenomena associated with these wave dynamics are being studied with a view to their potential impact on high performance aircraft, including the projected National Aerospace Plane (NASP). The presentation herein will show the results of analysis and of state-of-the-art numerical simulations, validated where possible by observational data, and illustrated with photographs from nature.