The mechanism of four nonlinearly interacting drift or Rossby waves is used as the basic process underlying the turbulent evolution of both the Charney-Hasegawa-Mima-equation CHME and its generalized modification GCHME. Hasegawa and Kodama’s concept of equivalent action or quanta is applied to the four-wave system and shown to control the distrib…
The generalized Charney-Hasegawa-Mima equation is unstable to a four wave modulational instability whereby a coherent, monochromatic drift wave can drive a band of modes and associated zonal flows unstable. Although initially the fastest growing modes dominate, a secondary nonlinear instability later drives the longest wavelength zonal flow and its…
The linear and nonlinear dynamics of zonal flows and their interactions with drift wave turbulence is considered in the simple but illuminating generalized Charney–Hasegawa–Mima model due to Smolyakov et al. [Phys. Plasmas 7 , 1349 (2000)]. Two positive definite, exact, integral invariants associated with the full generalized Charney–Hasegawa…
