Instability of Planetary Flows using Riemann Curvature: a Numerical Study

The instability of ideal non-divergent zonal flows on the sphere is determined numerically by the instability criterion of Arnol’d (1966) for the sectional curvature. Zonal flows are unstable for all perturbations besides for a small set which are in approximate resonance. The sectional curvature scales with $m\mathrm{/}\mathrm{\ell }$ for large total and zonal wave numbers $\mathrm{\ell }$ and $m$ of the perturbations. The planetary rotation is stable and the presence of rotation reduces the instability of perturbations.