Global existence for non-homogeneous incompressible inviscid fluids in presence of Ekman pumping

Abstract: In this paper, we study the global solvability of the density-dependent incompressible Euler equations, supplemented with a damping term of the form $ \mathfrak{D}{\alpha}^{\gamma}(\rho, u) = \alpha \rho^{\gamma} u $, where $\alpha>0$ and $ \gamma \in {0,1} $. To some extent, this system can be seen as a simplified model describing the mean dynamics in the ocean; from this perspective, the damping term can be interpreted as a term encoding the effects of the celebrated Ekman pumping in the system. On the one hand, in the general case of space dimension $d\geq 2$, we establish global well-posedness in the Besov spaces framework, under a non-linear smallness condition involving the size of the initial velocity field $u_0$, of the initial non-homogeneity $\rho_0-1$ and of the damping coefficient $\alpha$. On the other hand, in the specific situation of planar motions and damping term with $\gamma=1$, we exhibit a second smallness condition implying global existence, which in particular yields global well-posedness for arbitrarily large initial velocity fields, provided the initial density variations $\rho_0-1$ are small enough. The formulated smallness conditions rely only on the endpoint Besov norm $B^1{\infty,1}$ of the initial datum, whereas, as a byproduct of our analysis, we derive exponential decay of the velocity field and of the pressure gradient in the high regularity norms $B^s_{p,r}$.