A linear model is used to diagnose the onset of rotors in flow over 2D hills, for atmospheres that are neutrally stratified near the surface and stably stratified aloft, with a sharp temperature inversion in between, where trapped lee waves may propagate. This is achieved by coupling an inviscid two-layer mountain-wave model and a bulk boundary-layer model. The full model shows some ability to diagnose flow stagnation associated with rotors as a function of key input parameters, such as the Froude number and the height of the inversion, in numerical simulations and laboratory experiments carried out by previous authors. While calculations including only the effects of mean flow attenuation and velocity perturbation amplification within the surface layer represent flow stagnation fairly well in the more non-hydrostatic cases, only the full model, taking into account the feedback of the surface layer on the inviscid flow, satisfactorily predicts flow stagnation in the most hydrostatic case, although the corresponding condition is unable to discriminate between rotors and hydraulic jumps. Versions of the model not including this feedback severely underestimate the amplitude of trapped lee waves in that case, where the Fourier transform of the hill has zeros, showing that those waves are not forced directly by the orography.
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