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A wave equation for a time-dependent perturbation about the steady shallow-water solution emulates the metric an acoustic white hole, even upon the incorporation of nonlinearity in the lowest order. A standing wave in the sub-critical region of the flow is stabilised by viscosity, and the resulting time scale for the amplitude decay helps in providing a scaling argument for the formation of the hydraulic jump. A standing wave in the super-critical region, on the other hand, displays an unstable character, which, although somewhat mitigated by viscosity, needs nonlinear effects to be saturated. A travelling wave moving upstream from the sub-critical region, destabilises the flow in the vicinity of the jump, for which experimental support has been given.

The spherically symmetric stationary transonic (Bondi) flow is considered a classic example of an accretion flow. This flow, however, is along a separatrix, which is usually not physically realizable. We demonstrate, using a pedagogical example, that it is the dynamics which selects the transonic flow.

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