Internal solitary waves shoaling onto a shelf: Comparisons of weakly-nonlinear and fully nonlinear models for hyperbolic-tangent stratifications.

Highlights: [•] We study the evolution of shoaling internal solitary waves. [•] We used hyperbolic-tangent stratifications with thin pycnocline. [•] We did high resolution numerical simulations of full equations. [•] We compared results with predictions of weakly-nonlinear models. [•] The cubic RLW equation and a version of the Gardner equation gave best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]