A systematic method to derive the Hamiltonian and Nambu form for the shallow water equations using the conservation for energy and potential enstrophy is presented. Different mechanisms, such as vortical flows and emission of gravity waves, emerge from different conservation laws for total energy and potential enstrophy. The equations are constructed using exterior differential forms and self-adjoint operators, and result in the sum of two Nambu brackets-one for the vortical flow and one for

more »

... wave-mean flow interaction-and a Poisson bracket representing the interaction between divergence and geostrophic imbalance. The advantage of this approach is that the Hamiltonian and Nambu forms can here be written in a coordinate-independent form.