Uniqueness for the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation with a measure as initial vorticity

We show that any solution of the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation whose vorticity distribution is uniformly bounded in $L^1(R^2)$ for positive times is entirely determined by the trace of the vorticity at $t = 0$, which is a finite measure. When combined with previous existence results by Cottet, by Giga, Miyakawa, and Osada, and by Kato, this uniqueness property implies that the Cauchy problem for the vorticity equation in $R^2$ is globally well-posed in the space of finite measures. In particular, this provides an example of a situation where the Navier-Stokes equation is well-posed for arbitrary data in a function space that is large enough to contain the initial data of some self-similar solutions.