Damping effects of viscous dissipation on growth of symmetric instability

Abstract: Symmetric instability (SI) is a frontal instability arising from the interaction of rotation with lateral and vertical shear of a frontal jet and is a generalization of shear, centrifugal, and gravitational instabilities. While the onset of SI has been studied in numerous observations and models, intuition about its growth in physical ocean comes primarily from constant-viscosity linear instability analysis and large eddy simulation (LES). A forward cascade arising from SI in the real ocean, where numerous fine-to-microscale processes interact with growing SI velocity cells, is less understood. While many instances of symmetrically unstable flow have been observed, observations of enhanced turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) dissipation ($\epsilon$) at these sites are less common. We use numerical instability analysis of an idealized geostrophic jet to show that viscous-diffusive effects of preexisting turbulence from other turbulent processes (e.g., competing instabilities, internal wave processes, or boundary layer processes) can suppress the growth of SI in the real ocean. For example, a moderate level of ambient turbulence, represented by uniform diffusivity and viscosity of $\kappa =\nu = 10^{-4} m^2/s$, restricts the wavelength range of SI's fastest-growing mode from $\mathcal{O}(10-100)$m to $\mathcal{O}(100)$m and elongates its e-folding timescale by $\mathcal{O}(1-10)$ hrs; suggesting the net viscous-diffusive effects of preexisting turbulence can damp the growth of SI. Viscous damping is one possible explanation for the rarity of SI structures in the real ocean, and our results motivate the inclusion of dependence on previous-timestep $\epsilon$ or $\kappa$ when parameterizing SI in regional models.