Fronts, Waves and Vortices in Geophysical Flows

Most well known structures in planetary atmospheres and the Earth’s oceans are jets or fronts interacting with vortices on a wide range of scales. The transition from one state to another, such as in unbalanced or adjustment flows, involves the generation of waves as well as the interaction of coherent structures with these waves.

This book presents a fluid mechanics perspective to the dynamics of fronts and vortices and their interaction with waves in geophysical flows. It provides a basic physical background for modeling coherent structures in a geophysical context, and it gives essential information on advanced topics such as spontaneous wave emission and wavemomentum transfer in geophysical flows.

Based on a set of lectures by leading specialists, this text is targeted at graduate students, researchers and engineers in geophysics and environmental fluid mechanics.

• Ocean
• Scale
• atmosphere
• dynamics
• environmental fluid mechanics
• fluid dynamics
• fluid mechanics
• geophysical fluid dynamics
• geophysics
• geostrophic flows
• rotating fluids
• stability
• vortices
• wave-vortex interactions
• waves
• fluid- and aerodynamics

From the reviews:

“The book on ‘Fronts, Waves and Vortices in Geophysical Flows’ contains selected contributions from lecturers to the summer school which … was held in Valsavarenche, Italy in June 2006. … The texts of all lectures are written clearly and precisely, the figures are transparent and instructive … . will interest lecturers of geophysical fluid dynamics courses as an excellent source of constructive and stimulating ideas. … also of interest to graduate students and researchers working in ocean physics, atmosphere physics, fluid mechanics and applied mathematics.”­­­ (Andrzej Icha, Pure and Applied Geophysics, Vol. 168, 2011)

“In an effort to acquaint graduate students, researchers, and engineering scientists in geophysical fluid dynamics and atmospheric sciences with the current research and developments in the subject, this collection was developed from a set of lectures on fronts, waves, and vortices … . this is an excellent book for graduate and post-graduate students and researchers in ocean and atmospheric dynamics. So, this volume can be strongly recommended to the reader interested in waves and vortices in rotating and/or stratified fluid flows.” (L. Debnath, Mathematical Reviews, February, 2013)

• Labo. Ecoulements Géophysiques et, Industriels, Université Grenoble I, Grenoble CX 04, France

  Jan-Bert Flor

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