Edited by R.H.J. Grimshaw, this book covers the topic of solitary waves in fluids.

Since the first description by John Scott Russel in 1834, the solitary wave phenomenon has attracted considerable interests from scientists. The most interesting discovery since then has been the ability to integrate most of the nonlinear wave equations which govern solitary waves, from the Korteweg-de Vries equation to the nonlinear Schrodinger equation, in the 1960's. From that moment, a huge amount of theoretical works can be found on solitary waves. Due to the fact that many physical phenomena can be described by a soliton model, applications have followed each other, in telecommunications

This is the first thorough examination of weakly nonlocal solitary waves, which are just as important in applications as their classical counterparts. The book describes a class of waves that radiate away from the core of the disturbance but are nevertheless very long-lived nonlinear disturbances.

The dynamics of flows in density-stratified fluids has been and remains now an important topic for scientific enquiry. Such flows arise in many contexts, ranging from industrial settings to the oceanic and atmospheric environments. It is the latter topic which is the focus of this book. Both the ocean and atmosphere are characterised by the basic vertical density stratification, and this feature can affect the dynamics on all scales ranging from the micro-scale to the planetary scale. The aim of this book is to provide a “state-of-the-art” account of stratified flows as they are relevant to the ocean and atmosphere with a primary focus on meso-scale phenomena; that is, on phenomena whose time and space scales are such that the density stratification is a dominant effect, so that frictional and diffusive effects on the one hand and the effects of the earth’s rotation on the other hand can be regarded as of less importance. This in turn leads to an emphasis on internal waves.