Solitary waves, breathers, and rogue waves modulated by long waves for a model of a baroclinic shear flow

Investigated in this paper is a quasigeostrophic two-layer model for the wave packets in a marginally stable or unstable baroclinic shear flow. We find that the wave packets can be modulated by certain long waves, resulting in different behaviors from those in the existing literature. Via the bilinear method, we construct the modulated Nth-order (N = 1, 2,...) solitary waves, breathers, and rogue waves for the wave-packet equations. Based on the modulation effects of the long waves, the solitary waves are classified into three types, i.e., Type-I, Type-II, and Type-III solitary waves. Type-I solitary waves, without the modulations, are the bell shaped and propagate with constant velocities; Type-II solitary waves, with the weak modulations, are shape changing within a short time and subsequently return to the bell-shaped state; and Type-III solitary waves, with the strong modulations, show not only the variations of shapes but also the appearances, splits, combinations, and disappearances of certain bulges in the evolution. For the interaction between the two unmodulated solitary waves, two Type-I solitary waves can bring about the oscillations in the interaction zone when they possess different velocities, and bring into being the bound-state, oscillation-state, and bi-oscillation-state solitary waves when they possess the same velocity. For the two interactive modulated solitary waves, bound-state, oscillation-state, and bi-oscillation-state solitary waves with the short-time variations of shapes or appearances of bulges can occur. Due to the modulations of the long waves, breathers and rogue waves are distorted and stretched, mainly in two aspects: one is the evolution trajectories for the breathers; the other is the shape variations for each element of the breathers and rogue waves. Numbers of the peaks and valleys for the rogue waves are adjustable via the modulations. In addition, modulated breathers and rogue waves can degenerate into the M- or W-shaped or multipeak solitary waves under certain conditions.