Spectral Analysis of the Efficiency of Vertical Mixing in the Deep Ocean due to Interaction of Tidal Currents with a Ridge Running down a Continental Slope

Efficiency of mixing, resulting from the reflection of an internal wave field imposed on the oscillatory background flow with a three-dimensional bottom topography, is investigated using a linear approximation. The radiating wave field is associated with the spectrum of the linear model, which consists of those mode numbers n and slope values α, for which the solution represents the internal waves of frequencies ω = nω0 radiating upwrad of the topography, where ω0 is the fundamental frequency at which internal waves are generated at the topography. The effects of the bottom topography and the earth’s rotation on the spectrum is analyzed analytically and numerically in the vicinity of the critical slope