On the pressure transfer function for solitary water waves with vorticity (Q368638)

The author considers a two dimensional inviscid and incompressible fluid on a flat bed, whose surface is moving in a free way. Solving a boundary value problem for Euler's system, he tries to determine the surface profile of a steady solitary wave. He concludes that if the wave velocity exceeds the horizontal fluid velocity, then the surface profile is uniquely determined by the pressure function on the flat bed. Since the free surface is a part of the boundary, this is a free boundary value problem. He avoids this difficulty introducing the hodograph transformation in the following way. Considering the stream function \(\psi (x,y)\), he regards \((q,p)=(x, \psi (x,y))\) as new independent variables instead of \((x,y)\). This is justified due to the above assumption for the wave velocity. Then the unknown free surface of the fluid is represented in the form \(p=\text{constant}\). This enables one to reduce the original problem to an elliptic boundary value problem on an recangular domain in \(\mathbb R_q \times\mathbb R_q \). Then the result follows from Bernoulli's law.