GLOBAL EXISTENCE RESULTS FOR THE ANISOTROPIC BOUSSINESQ SYSTEM IN DIMENSION TWO

Abstract

Models with a vanishing anisotropic viscosity in the vertical direction are of relevance for the study of turbulent flows in geophysics. This motivates us to study the two-dimensional Boussinesq system with horizontal viscosity in only one equation. In this paper, we focus on the global existence issue for possibly large initial data. We first examine the case where the Navier–Stokes equation with no vertical viscosity is coupled with a transport equation. Second, we consider a coupling between the classical two-dimensional incompressible Euler equation and a transport–diffusion equation with diffusion in the horizontal direction only. For both systems, we construct global weak solutions à la Leray and strong unique solutions for more regular data. Our results rest on the fact that the diffusion acts perpendicularly to the buoyancy force.