Boundary Mixing and Arrested Ekman Layers: Rotating Stratified Flow Near a Sloping Boundary

We are concerned here with the behavior of a rotating, stratified fluid near a sloping rigid boundary, with boundary conditions of zero normal buoyancy flux and no slip. Although this is an interesting fluid dynamical problem in its own right, we have been motivated by two major, and at first sight disparate, topics in physical oceanography. The first, known as "boundary mixing", is concerned with how turbulent mixing at the sloping sides of the density-stratified ocean affects the stratification in the interior. The second topic involves the way in which the combination of strati