Abstract
Salmon’s nearly geostrophic model for rotating shallow-water flow is derived in full spherical geometry. The model, which results upon constraining the velocity field to the height field in Hamilton’s principle for rotating shallow-water dynamics, constitutes an important prototype of Hamiltonian balanced models. Instead of Salmon’s original approach, which consists in taking variations of particle paths at fixed Lagrangian labels and time, Holm’s approach is considered here, namely variations are taken on Lagrangian particle labels at fixed Eulerian positions and time. Unlike the classical quasigeostrophic model, Salmon’s is found to be sensitive to the differences between geographic and geodesic coordinates. One consequence of this result is that the β plane approximation, which is included in Salmon’s original derivation, is not consistent for this class of model.