And here is my new favourite experiment again: Planetary Rossby waves! This time filmed with a co-rotating camera.

We have a square tank with a sloping bottom at solid body rotation (except this annoying slogging because the rotating table wasn’t levelled out [meaning: I didn’t level it before starting the experiment…]). We then release a blue ice cube in the eastern corner of the shallow end of the tank and watch as the melt water column stretches down to the bottom, and is driven back up the slope to conserve vorticity. A planetary Rossby wave develops and propagates westward!

Above, we are looking at the tank east-to-west. Note the sloping bottom with the deep side on the left. And just look at all these beautiful eddies!

This is what it looks like in motion:

Watch the full experiment here if you are still curious after seeing the 1.5 minutes above :-)