The unsteady travelling ‘spots’ or spot-like disturbances are produced, in an otherwise planar boundary layer, by an initial impulse/blip, from wall forcing or from nearby external forcing. Theory and computations are described for the evolving spot-like structure, yielding initial-value problems for inviscid spot-like disturbances, commencing near the onset of an adverse pressure gradient. A transient stage incorporates the initial conditions, following which adverse pressure gradient effects become significant. Leading and trailing critical layers then form, which confine and define the spot-like disturbance, and these depart from the wall downstream accompanied by disturbance amplification and mean flow distortion. The interplay of adverse pressure gradient effects with three-dimensionality, nonlinearity and non-parallelism is considered in turn.

Three-dimensional effects provoke a universal closed planform of spot-like disturbance, which has a different side behaviour from the zero-gradient case. Nonlinear interactions eventually change the internal structure, particularly at the spot-like disturbance leading edge, while pointing to the mean-flow alteration underhanging the spot-like disturbance and to a pressure-feedback alteration for the region behind the spot-like disturbance. These two alterations offer complementary mechanisms for describing the calmed region trailing a spot-like disturbance, in which an attached thinned wall layer is identified. Non-parallel effects lead to enhanced spot-like disturbance growth and larger-scale/shorter-scale interactive behaviour downstream. The approach to separation is also considered, yielding maximal growth for small spot-like disturbances at 5/6 of the way from the minimum pressure position to the separation position. Links with recent experiments on adverse-gradient spot-like disturbances and with findings on calmed region properties are investigated, as well as the unsteady forcing effects from an incident relatively thick vortical wake outside the boundary layer.