In this paper we study a three dimensional thermocline planetary geostrophic ``horizontal" hyper--diffusion model of the gyre-scale midlatitude ocean. We show the global existence and uniqueness of the weak and strong solutions to this model. Moreover, we establish the existence of a finite dimensional global attractor to this dissipative evolution system. Preliminary computational tests indicate that our hyper--diffusion model does not exhibit any of the nonphysical instabilities near the literal boundary which are observed numerically in other models.
Categories: math.AP