Preface to print version of WHOI Technical Report WHOI-99-07 Tim Duda Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution July 1999 This volume contains papers contributed by particpants in a workshop entitled "Internal Solitary Waves in the Ocean: Their Physics and Implications for Acoustics, Biology and Geology". The meeting was organized by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MA, USA) and the Institute of Ocean Sciences (BC, Canada), and was held at Dunsmuir Lodge, Sidney, BC, Canada on October 27-29, 1998. Participants were requested to submit short papers on either research results or research issues, to be made available to attendees prior to the meeting. The response was good, resulting in this diverse set of forty papers. Only the papers are published here. The proceedings and results of the workshop will appear elsewhere. The energetic and ubiquitous nature of internal solitary waves force researchers in all disciplines of coastal oceanography to consider their effects. For example, the waves strongly influence acoustics, organisms, the sea surface, the seafloor, turbulent mixing, momentum flux, and mass flux. The purpose of the workshop was to bring togther an international and interdisciplinary group of nonlinear wave and solitary wave investigators. many of the physical oceanographic participants in theis workshop attended the internal solitary wave special session of the February 1998 AGU Ocean Scisnces Meeting, but that session lacked the interdisciplinary nature we strove for and was enveloped by the other diverse and interesting sessions of the meeting. The AGU meetings also do not fully represent research outside of North America, although ironically a few Asian February AGU participants could not attend in October. First and foremost, these are internet (web) publications, accessible from the web site http://www.whoi.edu/science/AOPE/ISW98workshop/ . For the purposes of citation and browsing they are being reproduced in this printed Technical Report format. However, many of the figures were created for viewing on video monitors and are best examined online. Some (but not exhaustive) efforts have been made to improve their appearence here. The papers are grouped into seven categories. Many other alternative groupings would have been sensible. Many of the papers concern more than one topic, so please don't let the organization limit your survey. Papers are alphabetized within each group by first author. The topics of the papers are described here; to avoid adding personal bias the conclusions are not. Group 1, Acoustics (eight papers), contains seven papers concerned with propagation of 200-2000 Hz signals through wave-riddled coastal environments. The eighth paper (Stanton et al.) examines 43-1000 kHz water-column backscatter obtained from a platform towed through waves. Of the others, Tiemann et al. present signal fluctuations at Gibraltar. Shang et al. present an inversion scheme. Chiu, Duda and Preisig, Finette et al. and Warn-Varnas et al. discuss modeling of signal variations from internal solitary waves. Colosi and Lynch describe some experimental results, discuss the knowledge of the community at this time, and list open issues. The Oakey and Cochrane paper of group 4 compares acoustic backscatter to turbulent dissipation and could very well have been placed in this group. Group 2, Biology (three papers), contains two papers (Lennert-Cody and Franks, Pineda) dealing with planktonic transport by internal solitary waves and bores, including organism distribution and response. Each examines observations. The other paper (Chang and Dickey) discusses optical signal variability (chlorophyll and sediment) observed during solitary wave events. Group 3, Waves and Flows with Regional Constraints (seven papers), contains one paper on thermocline waves observed in very deep water (Pinkel) and one covering wave observations over a flat bottom in the shelf (Levine and Boyd). Three papers are on nonlinear waves and flows in confined regions: D'Asaro, observations at a sill; Grue, modeling at a sill; and Helfrich and Pratt, modeling in a channel. The Baines et al. paper discusses theory and experiments on unstable waves in downslope flow of a dense bottom layer. Vithanage and Sullivan present observations of strong vertical motion near an island. Group 4, Dissipation (three papers), contains one paper on observed wave-amplitude decay at a shoaling site (Lerczak et al.), one paper comparing turbulent dissipation to acoustic backscatter (Oakey and Cochrane), and one paper on the topic of dissipation observed in high-amplitude solitary waves (Stanton). Group 5, Remote Sensing (four papers), has three papers which discuss satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of internal solitary waves, including inversion for wave and water column parameters. Liu and Hsu discuss China Sea waves, Porter and Thompson discuss inversion in the Mid-Atlantiv Bight, and Small et al. consider waves north west of the United Kingdom. The fourth paper by Kropfli et al. covers Doppler radar and microwave radiometer signals from coastal internal waves. Group 6, Sediments and Optics (three papers) includes one paper concerning nonlinear internal wave effects at continental slopes (Cacchione). Bogucki and Redekopp model a mechanism enabling internal solitary waves to resuspend sediment. Butman et al. describe a field program to study coastal internal waves and resuspension. The paper by Chang and Dickey (group 2) could also have been in this group. Group 7, Wave Physics (twelve papers) is made up of papers concerned with wave dynamics and wave properties rather than with the geophysical or biological ramifications of their presence. The group 3 papers belong here in principle but were separated because they focus on particular topographic or forcing structures. This group is very diverse. Apel shows evidence for a new and not-understood generation mechanism involving large-scale currents. Evans examines theoretically-derived wave shapes. Farmer and Armi show observations and suggest that shear-flow instability may contribute to generation. Grimshaw and Pelinovsky discuss a wave evolution equation which includes shear, topography, dissipation, rotation, and cubic nonlinearity. Three papers (Holloway et al., Lam et al. and Pelinovsky et al.) compare wave observations to model predictions. Lamb compares wave shapes from weakly and fully-nonlinear wave theories. Lynett and Liu model waves and crossing wave-wave interactions. Ostrovsky discusses various wave evolution equations. Shapiro et al. examine mass transport by internal solitary waves analagous to the Stokes drift of surface waves. Sherwin and Jeans critically examine compatibility of observed waves with wave propagation theories. I would like to dedicate this report to Michelle Yachnik at Dunsmuir Lodge who did a fine job of helping us organize the meeting. She passed away unexpectedly just prior to the meeting. Finally, the papers appearing here and at the web site are copyrighted material. Please contact the authors for copyright information.