Topics in Fluid Dynamics
A set of graduate-level essays developed for MIT's course 12.800, Fluid Dynamics of the Atmosphere and Ocean, taught to incoming students in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography. The material covers Lagrangian and Eulerian representations of fluid flow, dimensional analysis and scaling for models and data sets, and a five-part Coriolis tutorial running from inertial and geostrophic motion through a rotating shallow water model, beta effects, wind-driven ocean circulation and the Sverdrup relation, and the seasonal circulation of the Arabian Sea. Each essay goes deeper into the mathematics than a standard fluids textbook, and MATLAB and Fortran data files let a student run the models directly rather than just read about them. Offered as an MIT OpenCourseWare resource built for self-study, with no enrollment or certificate involved.