MATH5285 Fluids, Oceans and Climate

MATH5285 is a Honours and Postgraduate Coursework Mathematics course. See the course overview below.

Units of credit: 6

Exclusion: MATH3261 (jointly taught with MATH5285)

Cycle of offering: Term 3 

Graduate attributes: The course will enhance your research, inquiry and analytical thinking abilities.

More information:  The Course outline will be made available closer to the start of term - please visit this website:  www.unsw.edu.au/course-outlines

Course outlines contain information about course objectives, assessment, course materials and the syllabus.

Important additional information as of 2023

UNSW Plagiarism Policy

The University requires all students to be aware of its policy on plagiarism.

For courses convened by the School of Mathematics and Statistics no assistance using generative AI software is allowed unless specifically referred to in the individual assessment tasks.

If its use is detected in the no assistance case, it will be regarded as serious academic misconduct and subject to the standard penalties, which may include 00FL, suspension and exclusion.

The Online Handbook entry contains information about the course. (The timetable is only up-to-date if the course is being offered this year.)

If you are currently enrolled in MATH5285, you can log into UNSW Moodle for this course.

The mathematical modelling and theory of problems arising in the flow of fluids, the oceans and the global climate. Cartesian tensors, kinematics, mass conservation, vorticity, Navier-Stokes equation. Topics from inviscid and viscous fluid flow, gas dynamics, sound waves, water waves. The dynamics underlying the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans are detailed using key concepts such as geostrophy, the deformation radius and the conservation of potential vorticity. The role of Rossby waves, shelf waves, turbulent boundary layers and stratification is discussed. The atmosphere-ocean system as a global heat engine for climate variablity is examined using models for buoyant forcing, quasi-geostrophy and baroclinic instability.