On stationary Quasi-Geostrophic Shallow-Water flows

In this paper, we prove the existence of $\mathbf{m}$-fold doubly-connected stationary vortex patches for the quasi-geostrophic shallow-water equations.

The solutions are obtained through a bifurcation analysis based on the Crandall-Rabinowitz theorem, with either the inner radius of an annulus or the Rossby deformation length serving as the bifurcation parameter.

A central feature of the work is the highly nontrivial analysis of modified Bessel functions arising in the spectral study of the linearized operator.

The proof requires delicate and extensive manipulations of these special functions, including precise asymptotic expansions, differentiation formulas, recurrence identities, monotonicity properties and the analysis of singular quantities governing the bifurcation mechanism.

These ingredients are essential for characterizing the bifurcation points and establishing the transversality conditions.

Finally, we investigate the radial symmetry of stationary and uniformly rotating simply-connected vortex patch solutions, therefore motivating the previous bifurcation results.