Viscous perturbations of vorticity-conserving flows and separatrix splitting

We examine the effect of the breaking of vorticity conservation by viscous dissipation on transport in the underlying fluid flow. The transport of interest is between regimes of different characteristic motion and is afforded by the splitting of separatrices. A base flow that is vorticity conserving is therefore assumed to have a separatrix that is either a homoclinic or heteroclinic orbit. The corresponding vorticity dissipating flow, with small time-dependent forcing and viscous parameter epsilon, maintains an O(epsilon) closeness to the inviscid flow in a weak sense. An appropriate Melnikov theory that allows for such weak perturbations is then developed. A surprisingly simple expression for the leading-order distance between perturbed invariant (stable and unstable) manifolds is derived which depends only on the inviscid flow. Finally, the implications for transport in barotropic jets are discussed.