The linear impulse response for disturbances in an oscillatory Stokes layer

A brief review is given of numerical simulation results for the evolution of disturbances in a flat oscillatory Stokes layer. A spatially localised form of impulsive forcing is applied to trigger the disturbances. For the linearized case, the disturbance development displays an intriguing family tree-like structure, which involves the birth of successive generations of wavepackets. Although some features of the wavepacket behaviour may be accounted for using a Floquet linear stability analysis, for Fourier modes with prescribed wavenumbers, the discovery of the tree-like structure was completely unexpected. Simulation results were also obtained for nonlinear disturbances, where highly localised spikes were found to develop.