Abstract:

The Earth’s outer core is a rotating ellipsoidal shell of compressible, stratified and self gravitating fluid. As such, in the treatment of geophysical problems a realistic model of this body needs to be considered. In this work, we consider compressible and stratified fluid core models with different stratification parameters, related to the local Brunt-Vaisala frequency, in order to study the effects of the core’s density stratification on the frequencies of some of the inertial-gravity modes of this body. The inertial-gravity modes of the core are free oscillations with periods longer than 12 hr. Historically, an incompressible and homogeneous fluid is considered to study these modes and analytical solutions are known for the frequencies and the displacement eigenfunctions of a spherical model. We show that for a compressible and stratified spherical core model the effects of non-neutral density stratification may be significant, and the frequencies of these modes may change from model to model....