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This introductory text, based on the author's long-standing teaching experience, aims to provide a basic preparation of fluid dynamics, with particular attention to the dynamics of the oceans and the atmosphere, which require consideration of the Coriolis force. The most salient features of this text are its simplicity and compactness. As for simplicity, much attention has been paid to the connections between the various topics, not skimping on simple and intuitive explanations, so that the reader can easily acquire a unitary vision of the subject. As for its compactness, this is evident in the limited, yet sufficiently broad, range of topics analyzed, considered fundamental. This text is, therefore, particularly suitable for a wide audience of upper undergraduate students, but it also constitutes a valuable resource for master's and doctoral students, as well as to researchers who carry out their scientific activity in the broad context of meteorology, oceanography, and climatology.
List of contents
Preface.- Chapter 1 Introduction.- PART I: Fluid Dynamics in Inertial Reference Frames.- Chapter 2 Forces in fluid dynamics.- Chapter 3 Fundamentals of fluid statics.- Chapter 4 Fundamentals of fluid kinematics.- Chapter 5 The equations of fluid dynamics.- Chapter 6 Turbulence and eddy viscosity.- Chapter 7 Flow at low Reynolds number.- Chapter 8 Flow at large Reynolds number.- Chapter 9 Fundamentals of surface gravity waves.- Chapter 10 Energy and statistics of surface gravity waves.- Chapter 11 Fundamentals ofinternal gravity waves.- PART II: Fluid Dynamics in Rotating Reference Frames.- Chapter 12 Coriolis force, geostrophic motion.- Chapter 13 Characteristics of rotating fluids.- Chapter 14 The thermal wind.- Chapter 15 Ageostrophic winds in the atmospheric boundary layers.- Chapter 16 Ageostrophic currents in the oceanic boundary layers.- Chapter 17 The shallow water approximation.- Chapter 18 Potential vorticity and applications.- Chapter 19 Quasigeostrophic approximation, Rossby waves.- Chapter 20 Oceanic and atmospheric vortices, general circulation.- Appendix 1 Gauss-Green and Stokes theorems.- Appendix 2 Representation of surface forces by means of the stress tensor.- Appendix 3 Relative motion near a point.- Appendix 4 Kelvin's circulation theorem.- Bibliography.
About the author
Stefano Pierini is a full professor of Oceanography, Meteorology and Climatology at the Parthenope University of Naples. He received his Laurea in Physics -Magna Cum Laude- at the La Sapienza University of Rome and carried out his post-Laurea research activity at the same university and at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge (UK). He then benefited from several research scholarships and projects that allowed him to visit the University of Florida, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Hamburg University, Utrecht University, SINTEF (Norway), CNRS (Grenoble) and the Institut Henry Poincaré (Paris). Pierini has held university professorships since 1984 at the Naval University Institute of Naples, University of L’Aquila and Parthenope University of Naples. Pierini is the author of 85 publications in the main scientific journals in his field (a third of which are single-author papers, in 12 other articles he is the lead author). Pierini coordinated five projects of the European Commission and was also the coordinator of research units of several other European and national projects. His current research interests focus on the application of nonlinear dynamical systems theory to some relevant aspects of climate physics, such as the characterization of the link between astronomical forcing and glacial terminations and the intrinsic variability of the Kuroshio Extension, Gulf Stream and Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The adopted methodologies include the numerical resolution of the PDEs of fluid dynamics and of the ODEs of low-dimensional spectral models, as well as laboratory experiments with rotating platforms. Other research interests include coastal ocean modeling of the Tyrrhenian Sea, various aspects of the large-scale wind-driven ocean circulation, Rossby waves, nonlinear long gravity waves and nonlinear stability analysis of geophysical flows.
