#WaveWatchingWednesday

Another week’s worth of #wavewatching Instagram posts all in one place for your viewing pleasure! :-)

Starting off with a dramatic sunrise

How do we know there was a lot of rain during the night (well, in addition to having heard it)? There are wave ripples in the sand bank that has formed right next to where the storm drain leads into this little pond! That indicates quite a strong current and high flow, because if there isn’t a lot of water coming out at once, the current almost exclusively goes around the sand bank… The water level is regulated on the other side of the pond by a threshold, so it can’t raise any higher than that unless there is a really strong flow.

Funny how much a glimpse of a lighthouse and of a navigation buoy add to how much I enjoy a park :D

#wavewatching also works well in the atmosphere! Can you spot the Kelvin-Helmholtz shear instabilities in the clouds that look like breaking waves?

Beautiful #wakewatching this morning!

Do you see the waves that get reflected on the edges come back towards the middle of the canal & form a cool checkerboard pattern?

Beautiful morning to be at the beach!

Look at how all the wave crests are being bent towards the beach as soon as the water gets shallow enough for the waves to feel the bottom!

Very successful in terms of fossil finds, too!

Love this pretty little fossilised sea urchin!

Mornings at the beach are THE BEST!

Good morning!

I never regret getting up early to squeeze in some beach time & quality #wavewatching before work!

Splashy waves make me happy

Here is a nice “all stages of a breaking wave in one pic” pic. From waves getting steeper and steeper, to toppling over, to being a foamy mess pushing up the beach, to flowing back into the sea. Circle of life.

Look how all the floaty bio stuff [technical term] filters out all the short wavelength waves and lets only the long wavelengths pass through!

It’s always fun to look back from the lighthouse towards the main land, along the peninsula, and observing how different the wave fields look on either side. And how they are both propagating towards the peninsula. Waves are awesome!

Here we see why foam looks white: because it consists of many many small bubbles that each reflect light from all over towards us, and all the different wavelengths combined end up looking white

Super cool interference pattern of waves that are bent around the lighthouse peninsula and their reflections. Check out the super pronounced wave ripples on the seafloor (and how the sand is completely flat where the beach falls dry in between waves)!

And that’s it for this week! Hope you had the chance to do some wave watching, too! :-)

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