All Physics Faculty Publications

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Chaos

Volume

32

Issue

11

Publisher

AIP Publishing LLC

Publication Date

11-8-2022

Award Number

NSF, Division of Chemistry (CHE) 1808225

Funder

NSF, Division of Chemistry (CHE)

First Page

1

Last Page

20

Abstract

As seen by an observer in the rotating frame, the earth’s small spheroidal deformations neutralize the centrifugal force, leaving only the smaller Coriolis force to govern the “inertial” motion of objects that move on its surface, assumed smooth and frictionless. Previous studies of inertial motion employ weakly spheroidal equations of motion that ignore the influence of the centrifugal force and yet treat the earth as a sphere. The latitude dependence of these equations renders them strongly nonlinear. We derive and justify these equations and use them to identify, classify, name, describe, and illustrate all possible classes of inertial motion, including a new class of motion called circumpolar waves, which encircle both poles during each cycle of the motion. We illustrate these classes using CorioVis, our freely available Coriolis visualization software. We identify a rotational/time-reversal symmetry for motion on the earth’s surface and use this symmetry to develop and validate closed-form small-amplitude approximations for the four main classes and one degenerate class of inertial motion. For these five classes, we supply calculations of experimentally relevant frequencies, zonal drifts, and latitude ranges.

Comments

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Chaos 32, 113122 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0123896 and may be found at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0123896.

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