Sara Tro, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder

Parameterized Ekman Layers on the Tilted f-plane in Quasigeostrophic Convection

Rapidly rotating Rayleigh Benard convection is known to generate a narrow viscous Ekman layer on a no-slip boundary. This Ekman layer may be parameterized by boundary conditions which extend the geostrophic interior all the way to the boundary, known as pumping conditions. We generalize the pumping boundary conditions to the tilted f-plane, for both no-slip and stress-free boundaries. No-slip boundary conditions are shown to affect the linear stability of the system, and the parameterized pumping conditions recover this effect. The parameterized pumping conditions may also be applied to an asymptotically reduced quasi-geostrophic model, for which we investigate both linear stability and fully nonlinear single-mode solutions.