Wave-averaged geostrophic balance

In the presence of inertia-gravity waves, the geostrophic and hydrostatic balance that characterises the slow dynamics of rapidly rotating, strongly stratified flows holds in a time-averaged sense and applies to the Lagrangian-mean velocity and buoyancy. We give an elementary derivation of this wave-averaged balance and demonstrate its accuracy in numerical solutions of the three-dimensional Boussinesq equations, using a simple configuration in which vertically planar near-inertial waves interact with a barotropic anticylonic vortex. We further use the conservation of the wave-averaged potential vorticity to predict the change in the barotropic vortex induced by the waves. Order-of-magnitude estimates based on these results suggest that Stokes drift associated with near-inertial waves is a non-negligible part of the sea-surface geostrophic velocity inferred from satellite altimetric measurements of sea-surface height.