Efficiency of mixing, resulting from the reflection of an internal wave field imposed onthe oscillatory background flow with a three-dimensional bottom topography, isinvestigated using a linear approximation. The radiating wave field is associated with thespectrum of the linear model, which consists of those mode numbers n and slope valuesα, forwhich the solution represents the internal waves of frequencies ω =nω0 radiating upwrad ofthe topography, where ω0 is the fundamental frequency at whichinternal waves are generated at the topography. The effects of the bottom topography andthe earth’s rotation on the spectrum is analyzed analytically and numerically in thevicinity of the critical slope
αn,θc = arcsin (n 2ω02-f 2 / N 2-f 2) 1/2
which is a slope with the same angle to the horizontal as the internal wavecharacteristic. In this notation, θ is latitude, f is the Coriolis parameterand N is thebuoyancy frequency, which is assumed to be a constant, which corresponds to the uniformstratification.
