A laminar planetary jet

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Abstract
A theory of a jet in a rotating, viscous fluid is developed. It is suggested that it may be related to a jet observed in an experiment with a rotating spherical shell of liquid and, in addition, may partly explain the existence of the subsurface equatorial current in the Pacific Ocean. The fundamental physical idea is that of a balance of vorticity brought into the jet by advection and diffused by friction. The necessary approximations are borrowed from boundary-layer theory. The linear case is solved completely and inferences about the non-linear jet are obtained by dimensional reasoning.