Baroclinic instabilities / Hadley cell circulation in a tank

The DIYnamics-inspired turntable that Torge and myself have been working on for our “dry theory to juicy reality” project is finally working well! This is what the setup now looks like (how simple is that?!) and we had an exciting morning testing different experiments! The one experiment that we have been using as test case […]

Combining rotation of a water tank with a temperature gradient: A Hadley cell circulation demo!

Yesterday, we combined a thermally-driven overturning circulation with the effects of rotation, and thus created a Hadley cell circulation. And while the tank was turning faster than we would have liked, we still managed to create a circulation that largely resembles the sketch below: An axially-symmetric overturning circulation (with cold water, indicated by blue arrows, […]

Hadley cell experiment

Cooling and rotation combined. (deutscher Text unten) I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this experiment before now! Pierre and I have conducted it a number of times, but somehow the documentation never happened. So here we go today! Martin and I ran the experiment for our own entertainment (oh the peace and quiet in […]

Why should students want engage in something that changes their identity as well as their view of themselves in relation to friends and family?

Another iEarth Teaching Conversation with Kjersti Daae and Torgny Roxå, summarized by Mirjam Glessmer “Transformative experiences” (Pugh et al., 2010) are those experiences that change the way a person looks at the world, so that they henceforth voluntarily engage in a new-to-them practice of sensemaking on this new topic, and perceive it as valuable. There are […]

A common misconception in rotating tank experiments, and one way of maybe not reinforcing it

A very common misconception when looking at atmosphere & ocean dynamics in a rotating tank is that the center of the tank represents one of the poles and the edge of the tank the equator. And there is one experiment that — I fear — might reinforce that misconception, and that is the one we […]

Thermal forcing vs rotation

The first experiment we ever ran with our DIYnamics rotating tank was using a cold beer bottle in the center of a rotating tank full or lukewarm water. This experiment is really interesting because, depending on the rotation of the tank, it will display different regimes. For small rotations we get a low latitude, laminar, tropical […]

Rotating (DIYnamics) kitchen oceanography experiments

On this page I’m sharing a bunch of videos that I did in my kitchen, using the DIYnamics setup for a rotating table. I’m recording these videos because several of my friends were planning on teaching with this exact setup right now, but can’t due to Covid etc. So I thought this might be the […]

Rotating tank experiments on a cone

I had so much fun playing with rotating tank experiments on a cone this afternoon! And with Torge Martin (who I have the awesome #DryTheory2JuicyReality project with) and Rolf Käse (who got me into tank experiments with an amazing lab course back in 2004, that I still fondly remember). We tried so many different things, […]

Combining a slowly rotating water tank with a temperature gradient: A thermal wind demonstration!

Setting up an overturning circulation in a tank is easy, and also interpreting the observations is fairly straightforward. Just by introducing cooling on one side of a rectangular tank a circulation is induced (at least for a short while until the tank fills up with a cold pool of water; see left plot of the […]