Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2006
A symposium on ‘Rotating fluid systems’ was held at La Jolla, California, from 28 March to 1 April 1966. The meeting was organized under the auspices of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and took place at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics of the University of California. There were 75 participants, and attendance was by invitation. The subjects discussed included steady flows, both thermally driven and non-thermal; transient motions and instabilities; planetary waves and gravity waves affected by rotation; inertial oscillations; and hydromagnetic flows relating to the Earth's interior. The following is a brief account of the proceedings as seen by the authors. No formal volume of the papers presented is to be published, but references to published or unpublished work are given at the end of this article.