An idealized study of barotropic eddies in the ocean will be conducted by means of numerical simulations and semi-analytic calculations. This is an important step to understanding the dynamics of isolated baroclinic vortices in a realistic ocean. Numerical simulations and laboratory experiments have shown that, although the intermediate behavior of the eddies can be very complicated, the final result of instability is either a stable rotating tripole or a pair of stable translating dipoles. An analytic study of the stability of the initial vorticity profiles to finite amplitude perturbations will also be done using a moment approach based on Lagrangian perturbations.
