This award provides partial support for nine U.S. scientists to participate in a seminar on geophysical fluid dynamics at Interlaken, Switzerland in September, 1988. Four Swiss researchers and other scientists from Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada are also expected to attend. Dr. Susan J. Friedlander, University of Illinois, Chicago, and Dr. Kolumban Hutter, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, are organizing the seminar. The purpose of the seminar is to bring together a group of scientists from several disciplines to exchange their research findings and ideas about internal waves in geophysical contexts. The participants include applied mathematicians, geophysicists, meteorologists, limnologists, oceanographers, and others. The unifying theme of the conference is the study of wave motion in rotating, stratified fluids. Such fluids possess a variety of wave motions that are significant to a large number of phenomena in lakes, oceans, the atmosphere and the earth's core. The seminar will cover four broad topics: (1) Effects of boundaries on internal waves, (2) Planetary waves on the beta-plane and in spherical shells, (3) Nonlinear internal waves, particularly solitary waves, and (4) Magnetohydrodynamic waves in rotating fluids. These topics have applications in understanding lake and ocean waves in various topographical conditions, atmospheric and planetary waves, earth core waves, interactions of different waves, and certain geophysical and astrophysical phenomena. The conference format will be several presentations of invited lectures followed by discussions each day. The proceedings of the conference will be published in a special issue of Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics with the seminar organizers as guest editors.
