Necessary and sufficient criteria for existence, regularity, and asymptotic stability of enhanced pullback attractors with applications to 3D primitive equations

We introduce several new concepts called enhanced pullback attractors for nonautonomous dynamical systems by improving the compactness and attraction of the usual pullback attractors in strong topology spaces uniformly over some infinite time intervals. Then we establish several necessary and sufficient criteria for the existence, regularity and asymptotic stability of these enhanced pullback attractors under general theoretical frameworks which are expected to be applied to many kinds of nonautonomous PDEs. These abstract results are applied to the famous 3D primitive equations modeling the large-scale ocean and atmosphere dynamics. We establish the existence, regularity and asymptotic stability of the enhanced pullback attractors for the nonautonomous primitive equations in [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] when the forces satisfy some mild conditions. The uniform pullback asymptotic compactness of the solution operators in [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are established by deriving the uniform “flattening effects” of the solutions in [Formula: see text] and the uniform [Formula: see text]-Hölder continuity of the solutions from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text] with respect to the initial data, respectively. Our approaches are applicable to prove the existence of global attractors for the autonomous primitive equations in [Formula: see text] provided [Formula: see text].