Linear inviscid damping for the $\beta$-plane equation

In this paper, we study the linear inviscid damping for the linearized $\beta$-plane equation around shear flows. We develop a new method to give the explicit decay rate of the velocity for a class of monotone shear flows. This method is based on the space-time estimate and the vector field method in sprit of the wave equation. For general shear flows including the Sinus flow, we also prove the linear damping by establishing the limiting absorption principle, which is based on the compactness method introduced by Wei-Zhang-Zhao in \cite{WZZ2}. The main difficulty is that the Rayleigh-Kuo equation has more singular points due to the Coriolis effects so that the compactness argument becomes more involved and delicate.