On Nonlinear Instability and Stability for Stratified Shear Flow

An example of stratified shear flow is presented in which an explicit construction is given for unstable eigenvalues with smooth eigenfunctions for the Taylor--Goldstein equation. It is proved for any stratified, plane parallel shear flow that the unstable spectrum of the linear operator is purely discrete. A general theorem is then invoked to prove that the specific example is nonlinearly unstable. A sufficient condition for nonlinear stability for stratified shear flow is discussed.