Poloidal flow generation in the dynamics of Rossby waves

Abstract

This paper considers the dynamics in the Charney-Hasegawa-Mima equation, basic to several different phenomena. In each of them, the generation of poloidal/zonal flow is important. The paper suggests a possibility to generate such flows (which can serve as transport barriers). Namely, one needs to create significant increments and decrements in the neighborhoods of some wave vectors k_{1} and k_{2} (respectively) such that (1) R_{k_{1}}<R_{k_{2}}, where R_{k} is the spectral density of the extra invariant kernel (I=∫R_{k}E_{k}dk is the extra invariant, with E_{k} being the energy spectrum), (2) |k_{1}|<|k_{2}|, and (3) k_{1}+k_{2} is a poloidal/zonal wave vector. These three conditions define a quite narrow region.