Fig. 16

Seamount wake. Snapshots of normalized vertical vorticity (left) and w (right) in horizontal planes for a simulated flow past a seamount. The upstream flow is steady and uniform, with \(V = 0.05\text { m/s}\) to the north. The bottom is flat at \(z = -\, 4000\) m away from the seamount that has a half-width of 10 km and a height of 600 m. Vertical vorticity is generated by drag on the slope (Fig. 15), the flow separates into an unstable wake, and the vortex filaments organize into coherent SCVs. In this instance, there is only weak lee gravity wave generation, as shown by the small w above the top of the seamount (Srinivasan et al. 2019)