UC Irvine

Large scale dynamics of the oceans and the atmosphere are governed by the primitive equations (PEs). It is well-known that the three-dimensional viscous PEs is globally well-posed in Sobolev spaces. On the other hand, the inviscid PEs without rotation is known to be ill-posed in Sobolev spaces, and its smooth solutions can form singularity in finite time. In this paper, we extend the above results in the presence of rotation. We construct finite-time blowup solutions to the inviscid PEs with rotation, and establish that the inviscid PEs with rotation is ill-posed in Sobolev spaces in the sense that its perturbation around a certain steady state background flow is both linearly and nonlinearly ill-posed in Sobolev spaces. Its linear instability is of the Kelvin-Helmholtz type similar to the one appears in the context of vortex sheets problem. This implies that the inviscid PEs is also linearly ill-posed in Gevrey class of order s>1, and suggests that a suitable space for the well-posedness is Gevrey class of order s=1, which is exactly the space of analytic functions.