Singular limits of the Cauchy problem to the two-layer rotating shallow water equations

Abstract We are concerned with two kinds of singular limits of the Cauchy problem to the two-layer rotating shallow water equations as the Rossby number and the Froude number tend to zero. First we construct the uniform estimates for the strong solutions to the system under the condition that the Froude number is small enough. Different from the previously studied cases, the large operator of this model is not skew-symmetric. One of the key new ideas in this paper is to obtain the uniform estimates using the special structure of the system rather than the antisymmetry of the large operator. After that the convergence of the equations with ill-prepared data to a two-layer incompressible Navier-Stokes system is proved with the help of Strichartz estimates constructed in this paper.