For an internal gravity wave ray at angle to the horizontal reflecting from a slope at angle , conservation of tangential wavenumber gives
At a subcritical internal-wave reflection, : the reflected wavelength shortens and its wavelength-averaged energy density increases by .
Set
where is the magnitude of the internal-wave ray slope and is the bottom slope. A rightward ray remains in the triangular basin precisely when its bottom reflection is subcritical internal-wave reflection, namely . Therefore
Conservation of frequency and of the component of the wavevector tangent to the slope gives the focusing power of internal-wave reflection
where . In this range , so the reflected wavelength is shorter by the factor . The reflected normal group velocity is smaller by ; conservation of normal energy flux therefore increases the wavelength-averaged energy density by
The maximum boundary slope is , so subcritical internal-wave reflection requires
or equivalently
Take without loss of generality, put
and write the incident field as the imaginary part of . The kinematic boundary condition on is
For a flat boundary the reflected wave is . Expanding the boundary condition in a Taylor expansion about creates the topographic sidebands of an internal gravity wave. With upward-radiating vertical wavenumber , their complex amplitudes through second order are
Thus the general compact result is
For the convenient nondegenerate case , all displayed sideband wavenumbers are positive. Defining , the same answer is the explicitly real formula
Validity requires a linear incident wave, an inviscid uniformly stratified bulk, an outgoing-radiation condition, strict separation from critical slopes, and small boundary excursions for every retained mode, in particular and . A vanishing is a degenerate zero-horizontal-wavenumber case and must be treated by taking the corresponding zero-amplitude limit rather than dividing by .