  The phenomenon of thermal and compositional (chemical) convection is very
common in nature and therefore of great importance from the point of view of
understanding of many fundamental aspects of the environment and universe. A
number of books have been written on the topic, such as e.g. the seminal work
of Chandrasekhar (1961) on Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability, a large
portion of which is devoted to the convective instability near its onset or the
outstanding book of Getling (1998) where systematization of the knowledge on
convection has been continued with a thorough description of the weakly
nonlinear stages. Most of the works, however, considered weakly stratified,
that is the so-called Boussinesq convection.
  It is the aim of this book to continue the process of systematization. It
seems important to put the current knowledge on weakly and strongly stratified
convection in order and provide a comprehensive description of the marginal,
weakly nonlinear and fully developed stages of convective flow in both cases.
To that end the book provides a short compendium of knowledge on the linear and
weakly nonlinear limits of the Boussinesq convection, as a useful reference for
a reader and than proceeds with a review of the theory on fully developed,
weakly stratified convection. The entire third chapter is devoted to a detailed
derivation and a study of the three aforementioned stages of stratified
(anelastic) convection. The description of stratified convection requires
extreme care, since many aspects have to be considered simultaneously for full
consistency. Detailed and systematic explanations are therefore provided. This
book is meant as a textbook for courses on hydrodynamics and convective flows,
for the use of lecturers and students, however, it may also be of use for the
entire scientific community as a practical reference.
