Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The basic problem faced in geophysical fluid dynamics isthat a mathematical description based only on fundamental physicalprinciples, the so-called the ``Primitive Equations'', is oftenprohibitively expensive computationally, and hard to studyanalytically. In this talk I will survey the main obstacles inproving the global regularity for the three-dimensionalNavier-Stokes equations and their geophysical counterparts. Eventhough the Primitive Equations look as if they are more difficult tostudy analytically than the three-dimensional Navier-Stokesequations I will show in this talk that they have a unique global(in time) regular solution for all initial data.Inspired by this work I will also provide a new globalregularity criterion for the three-dimensional Navier-Stokesequations involving the pressure.This is a joint work with Chongsheng Cao.