Geophysical Fluid Dynamics

The content of this book is based, largely, on the core curriculum in geophys­ ical fluid dynamics which I and my colleagues in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at The University of Chicago have taught for the past decade. Our purpose in developing a core curriculum was to provide to advanced undergraduates and entering graduate students a coherent and systematic introduction to the theory of geophysical fluid dynamics. The curriculum and the outline of this book were devised to form a sequence of courses of roughly one and a half academic years (five academic quarters) in length. The goal of the sequence is to help the student rapidly advance to the point where independent study and research are practical expectations. It quickly became apparent that several topics (e. g. , some aspects of potential theory) usually thought of as forming the foundations of a fluid-dynamics curriculum were merely classical rather than essential and could be, however sadly, dispensed with for our purposes. At the same time, the diversity of interests of our students is so great that no curriculum can truly be exhaust­ ive in such a curriculum period. It seems to me that the best that can be achieved as a compromise is a systematic introduction to some important segment of the total scope of geophysical fluid dynamics which is illustrative of its most fruitful methods.

The content of this book is based, largely, on the core curriculum in geophys­ ical fluid dynamics which I and my colleagues in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at The University of Chicago have taught for the past decade. Our purpose in developing a core curriculum was to provide to advanced undergraduates and entering graduate students a coherent and systematic introduction to the theory of geophysical fluid dynamics. The curriculum and the outline of this book were devised to form a sequence of courses of roughly one and a half academic years (five academic quarters) in length. The goal of the sequence is to help the student rapidly advance to the point where independent study and research are practical expectations. It quickly became apparent that several topics (e. g. , some aspects of potential theory) usually thought of as forming the foundations of a fluid-dynamics curriculum were merely classical rather than essential and could be, however sadly, dispensed with for our purposes. At the same time, the diversity of interests of our students is so great that no curriculum can truly be exhaust­ ive in such a curriculum period. It seems to me that the best that can be achieved as a compromise is a systematic introduction to some important segment of the total scope of geophysical fluid dynamics which is illustrative of its most fruitful methods.

The material in this book is based predominantly on my recent work. It is the first monograph on the subject, though some support material may overlap other monographs. The investigation of wave packets and their bi­ furcations is very interesting, and useful theoretically and in practice, not only in geophysical fluid dynamics, which is the field to which the theory is being applied here, but also in other fields in mathematics and the natural sciences.