Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
An incompressible magnetohydrodynamic flow, bounded below by a semi-infinite solid wall insulator with a plane surface, is weakly perturbed by two-dimensional (i.e. cylindrical) sources immersed within the fluid. Certain results of Chee-Seng(1) are employed to establish an exact analytic solution for arbitrary source functions. Both direct emission and reflected disturbance fields are hyperliptic, i.e. partly hyperbolic and partly elliptic. The reflected hyperbolic mode is propagated as a Riemann invariant of a modified incident field and its Hilbert transform. This propagation occurs along reflected characteristics whose (acute) inclination with the interface is generally unequal to that of the incident characteristics, but which are, instead, parallel to those non-incident characteristic rays emanating away from the interface.