Asymptotic stability and Rayleigh-Taylor instability of stratified states for the three-dimensional rotating primitive equations with gravity

Abstract

We study the 3D rotating primitive equations with gravity in a horizontally periodic channel, with viscous horizontal velocity and no density diffusion. For every Coriolis parameter, stably stratified equilibria are asymptotically stable. Small compatible \(H^4\) perturbations yield global classical solutions with uniform \(H^4\) bounds. The oscillatory density and velocity decay like \((1+t)^{-1}\); the density converges at the same rate to a stratified profile, its horizontal mean faster. For small data, the limit profile is the decreasing vertical rearrangement of the initial density, the unique potential-energy minimizer among rearrangements, independent of rotation, viscosity, and initial velocity. Kinetic plus available potential energy is dissipated exactly by viscosity and decays like \((1+t)^{-2}\), and each fluid particle settles where the limit density equals its own. These rates are optimal for every rotation rate. The linearized problem has real, slowly decaying normal modes, viscously overdamped high-vertical-wavenumber internal gravity waves, whose small solutions show the \(H^r\) density rates \((1+t)^{-(1-r/4)}\), \(0\le r<4\), pressure rate \((1+t)^{-1}\), and energy rate \((1+t)^{-2}\) cannot be improved uniformly for small data. Key difficulties are the loss of a horizontal derivative in the vertical velocity, the failure of \(H^1(\mathbb T^2)\subset L^\infty\), and rotation-induced coupling of divergent and vortical motion, controlled at top order by a positive power of the initial low-order energy. If the stratification is unstable somewhere, every horizontal mode is linearly unstable with real growth rates and the equilibrium is nonlinearly unstable; rotation strictly lowers each growth rate, with an explicit Taylor-number bound depending on the horizontal wavelength, but leaves their supremum unchanged.