I haven’t posted a #WaveWatchingWednesday in quite some time, so behind the cut there are a lot of pretty pictures for you! Enjoy!

Today, the most prominent features are clouds and contrails being reflected on the water. Although looking at the deformed reflection of the contrail (and assuming the pilot wasn’t doing weird things) there must still be quite some wave action going on!

If we look at the water here as at a Z, we see three different kinds of waves, one in each part.
In the top part, there are mainly locally-generated wind waves that make the surface look rough.
In the bottom part, there are standing waves in a current that is driven downward from a higher reservoir by gravity.
And in the / part, long wind waves that propagated in from the top part are slowly running up a slope and encountering the current coming out of the bottom part.
Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Wakes with (red) and without (green) the ship that caused them. The wavelets are one side of the respective V-shaped wakes with the ships at their tips. Nice to see for how long the traces of ships remain visible, long after the ships have sailed!

Good morning! :)

Do these waves look weird to you, as if there is no rhyme nor reason to them? Then you’ll be relieved to hear that they are occurring right on top of a very shallow area, where all pre-existing waves get amplified and bent around, forming this pattern that almost looks like a braid. Oh, and the bird and those wave rings around it? Just there to confuse you! :D

The best “good morning”: one with awesome #wavewatching! :)

Thanks to the very weird sky with a very dark band and bright blue everywhere else, the waves seem a lot more 3D than usual. Great for #wavewatching! Here we see the wake of a ship & its reflection on the sea wall, creating this amazing checkerboard pattern of positive and negative interference. Love it!

So much physics in one picture: a ship’s wake & its reflection creating the checkerboard interference pattern. Sea weed (some stuff growing in the water anyway ;)) changes the wave field by taking energy out and waves bending around it. And a seagull makes a tiny wake!

What’s up?
And what’s down? And what’s going on? Good morning!

What makes YOU realize you are looking at a water surface here? For me it’s not the weird perspective, it’s how reflections of structures are deformed where duckweeds create dips in the surface where gravity pulls them down and surface tension keeps them up

Always worth a visit: the ship lift! I have very fond memories of the first visits when I was a child (this was on our way to see my grandparents) — my sister not so much. But we went there today anyway (thanks!) and I still looove it. How insane is it to build a channel that can only be shipped if you lower or lift ships by some 40m?!

And then I remember how it blew my mind as a small child that those basins of water that lift the ships always weigh the same, no matter whether they are filled with water, or with water plus a ship! That definitely makes counterweights (which you see in the time lapse movie) a lot more feasible than if you had to know the weight of each ship. Physics is awesome!

Lovely waves on a calm pond. Thanks, ducky!

Very happy to report that the next generation of wave watchers is very much into ship lifts (or, as they say, “Schiffshebeberge”). Thanks for the picture @gabrielakux :)

…also, since I hardly ever see the back of my head, I have to note that I am pretty proud of my hair cut. The things you learn during isolation…

Have you ever noticed how the distance between falling drops in fountains increases the longer they’ve already fallen? They obviously have to move apart over time as they are accelerated by gravity, but noticing that kind of things always makes me happy! :)

“What does the ocean say to the beach?”
“Nothing, it just waves!”

A ship’s wake hits the small pontoon at sunrise. How awesome are these waves, please???

Waves are awesome

Just prepared my first ever batch of rheoscopic fluid (in which tiny particles align with the flow and REMAIN IN SUSPENSION, so perfect 3D flow tracer that works throughout a whole experiment and doesn’t just disperse right after you’ve put it in, and throughout the whole fluid and not just right where you put the dye!). Thanks #DIYnamics team for really upping my #kitchenoceanography game with this one! Can’t wait to make enough for the large tank!

€0.85 well spent. Now how do I get rid of the foam? Coffee filter was clearly not sufficient.
Also please note the waves! #kitchenoceanography and #wavewatching in one go, doesn’t get much better than this!

Thinking about rheoscopic (“current showing”) fluids, it jumped at me how the free floating sea grass is aligned with the direction of wave propagation, perpendicular to the sea wall & foam stripe. Makes sense, I guess, but I never noticed it as much as just now‬

It’s difficult to see because of the reflections, but by now there is a bunch of sea grass close & parallel(ish) to the sea wall, yet only a tiny little bit further offshore the sea grass is still perpendicular to the sea wall

At first I was a little miffed that I had to cycle a detour because a road was closed, but luckily I am easily distracted by waves, especially beautiful wakes like this one!

Good morning!

Waves just make me extremely happy!

Here we see all stages of a breaking wave in one picture:
In the back, a distinct crest starts to form.
In the breaking crest, from left to right, the crest becomes really steep, tips over, and breaks in a turbulent foamy mess.
In the foreground, water brought up the beach by the previous wave crest is running back into the sea

Successful morning in terms of fossil finds, too!

I call it “the splash”

Suuuuper awesome look into the breaking wave crests — see all the sea grass stuff floating in it? Even though we always learn that waves only transport energy, not mass, that’s not strictly true in all cases. Breaking waves do transport stuff — that’s how all the seaweed ends up on the beaches!

Good morning! :)

Morning #wavewatching with this beautiful wake & reflection. Have a great day, everybody! :)‬

I like me a good flow tracer! So much easier to see the currents with a little foam. Would you have suspected there was a swirl going on in the pond in the second picture if it wasn’t for the foam?

I’m quite enjoying the “bad” weather for a change. Thanks, ducky, for making some waves!

Ducks going crazy! But staying in the same spots, just wiggling away, so we get nice concentric wave rings! :)

Today: ducks & wakes! And reflections of ships. Feels almost a little autumn-y!

And that’s all I have for this #WaveWatchingWednesday. Now go out and do some wave watching yourself! :-)