Tidally-excited inertial waves in stars and planets: exploring the frequency-dependent and averaged dissipation with nonlinear simulations

We simulate the nonlinear hydrodynamical evolution of tidally excited inertial waves in convective envelopes of rotating stars and giant planets modeled as spherical shells containing incompressible, viscous, and adiabatically stratified fluid. This model is relevant for studying tidal interactions between close-in planets and their stars, as well as close low-mass star binaries. We explore in detail the frequency-dependent tidal dissipation rates obtained from an extensive suite of numerical simulations, which we compare with linear theory, including with the widely employed frequency-averaged formalism to represent inertial wave dissipation. We demonstrate that the frequency-averaged predictions appear to be quite robust and are approximately reproduced in our nonlinear simulations spanning the frequency range of inertial waves as we vary the convective envelope thickness, tidal amplitude, and Ekman number. Yet, we find nonlinear simulations can produce significant differences with linear theory for a given tidal frequency (potentially by orders of magnitude), largely due to tidal generation of differential rotation and its effects on the waves. Since the dissipation in a given system can be very different both in linear and nonlinear simulations, the frequency-averaged formalism should be used with caution. Despite its robustness, it is also unclear how accurately it represents tidal evolution in real (frequency-dependent) systems.