Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2006
The flow about an obstacle in horizontal motion relative to a stratified Boussinesq fluid in a deep, rapidly rotating container is studied. Numerical and asymptotic analyses of the linearized boundary-value problems for a shallow topography are made to delineate the influence of stratification and ground topography on wave and flow structure, and to ascertain the presence of a solitary anticyclonic, or cyclonic, disturbance in the far field at high as well as low stratification. Although the analyses are restricted to the rapidly rotating case corresponding to a vanishingly small Rossby number, it is pointed out that the cyclonic feature remains a valid inviscid description in the far field except for an infinite Rossby number corresponding to no rotation.