On the group-velocity property for wave-activity conservation laws

Vanneste, J. and Shepherd, T. G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6631-9968 (1998) On the group-velocity property for wave-activity conservation laws. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 55 (6). pp. 1063-1068. ISSN 0022-4928 doi: 10.1175/1520-0469(1998)055<1063:OTGVPF>2.0.CO;2

Abstract/Summary

The density and the flux of wave-activity conservation laws are generally required to satisfy the group-velocity property: under the WKB approximation (i.e., for nearly monochromatic small-amplitude waves in a slowly varying medium), the flux divided by the density equals the group velocity. It is shown that this property is automatically satisfied if, under the WKB approximation, the only source of rapid variations in the density and the flux lies in the wave phase. A particular form of the density, based on a self-adjoint operator, is proposed as a systematic choice for a density verifying this condition.