On the stability and propagation of barotropic modons in slowly varying media
Journal: cIRcle (University of British Columbia)
Year: 2010

Two aspects of the theory of barotropic modons are examined in this thesis. First, sufficient neutral stability conditions are derived in the form of an integral constraint for westward and eastward-travelling modons. It is shown that eastward-travelling and westward-travelling modons are neutrally stable to perturbations in which the energy is contained mainly in spectral components with wavenumber magnitudes (|ƞ|) satisfying |ƞ|&lt;κ and |ƞ|&gt;κ, respectively, where κ is the modon wavenumber.