This experiment just doesn’t want to be filmed by me. Even though I spent more time on preparation of this experiment than on almost any other experiment I have ever done! I have written up the theory behind this experiment, run it with a blob of dye to visualize the wave, then with a ring of dye. […]
Next attempt at the topographic Rossby wave! This time with following the geosci.uchicago.edu instructions more closely… …and then the tank had hickups, so we did get waves, but a lot more diffusive than we had hoped, because the tank slowed down a lot more and in a more bumpy fashion than I had planned… Setup of […]
Finally trying the topographic Rossby wave experiment I wrote about theoretically here! And it is working — ok-ish. If you know what you are looking for, you can kind of see it. So check out the picture above so you know what you expect to see below ;-) We are rotating the tank fairly rapidly […]
For both of my tank experiment projects, in Bergen and in Kiel, we want to develop a Rossby wave demonstration. So here are my notes on three setups we are considering, but before actually having tried any of the experiments. Background on Rossby waves I recently showed that rotating fluids behave fundamentally differently from non-rotating […]
Usually when we talk about waves on this blog, we talk about surface- or sometimes internal waves, but my waves almost always oscillate vertically. Today, we’ll mix things up a little: Rossby waves are waves in the horizontal plane. They exist for example as oscillations on the atmosphere’s jet stream. In order to understand what […]
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 […]
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, […]
Mirjam S. Glessmer & Pierré D. de Wet Abstract Even though experiments – whether demonstrated to, or personally performed by students – have been part of training in STEM for a long time, their effectiveness as an educational tool are sometimes questioned. For, despite students’ ability to produce correct answers to standard questions regarding these […]