Internal solitary waves shoaling onto a shelf: Comparisons of weakly-nonlinear and fully nonlinear models for hyperbolic-tangent stratifications

•We study the evolution of shoaling internal solitary waves.•We used hyperbolic-tangent stratifications with thin pycnocline.•We did high resolution numerical simulations of full equations.•We compared results with predictions of weakly-nonlinear models.•The cubic RLW equation and a version of the Gardner equation gave best results.

In this study the evolution of internal solitary waves shoaling onto a shelf is considered. The results of high resolution two-dimensional numerical simulations of the incompressible Euler equations are compared with the predictions of several weakly-nonlinear shoaling models of the Korteweg–de Vries family including the Gardner equation and the cubic regularized long wave (or Benjamin–Bona–Mahoney) equation. Wave models in both physical x–t space and in s–x space are considered where s is a commonly used characteristic time variable. The effects of rotation, background currents and damping are ignored. The Boussinesq and rigid lid approximations are also used. The shoaling internal solitary waves generally fission into several waves. Reflected waves are negligible in the cases considered here. Several hyperbolic tangent stratifications are considered with and without a critical point. Among the equations in x–t space the cubic regularized long wave equation gives the best predictions. The Gardner equation in s–x space gives the best predictions of the shape of the leading waves on the shelf, but for many stratifications it predicts a propagation speed that is too large.