Instabilities and waves on a columnar vortex in a strongly stratified and rotating fluid

This paper investigates the effect of the background rotation on the radiative instability of a columnar Rankine vortex in a strongly stratified fluid. We show that a cyclonic background rotation strongly stabilizes the radiative instability. The modes become neutral when the Rossby number Ro is below a critical value which depends on the azimuthal wavenumber of the wave. In the limit of small Rossby number, there exist fast neutral waves that are not captured by the quasi-geostrophic theory. In the presence of anticyclonic background rotation, the centrifugal instability dominates the radiative instability only when −400 ≲ Ro < −1. The numerical stability analysis is completed by asymptotic analyses for large wavenumbers which explain the properties and mechanisms of the waves and the instabilities. The stability of a continuous smoothed Rankine vortex is also investigated. The most amplified azimuthal wavenumber is then finite instead of infinite for the Rankine vortex.