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 (and there are a lot of inertial oscillations in the water even after a long spinup, don’t know why) and then slow it down just a little bit to create a current relative to the topography.

So it turns out that following instructions better might actually have been a good idea. We will do that some other day on a different rotating table.

Here is what we did today:

Setup of the topographic Rossby wave experiment

For a demonstration of topographic Rossby waves, we want the Coriolis parameter f to stay constant but have the depth H change. We use the instructions by geosci.uchicago.edu as inspiration for our experiment and

• build a shallow ridge into the tank. My solution: Take a 2.3 cm (outer) diameter hose, tape it to the bottom of a tank to achieve a ridge with smooth edges
• important difference to the geosci.uchicago.edu setup: We are just using our cylindrical tank without a solid cylinder in the middle. Therefore our ridge goes all the way across the tank. Main reason is that our rotating tank’s camera sits on six rods, so at fast rotations it is very difficult to insert dye and I thought this way might be easier. But that might not actually be true…
• 10 cm water depth
• spin up the tank to approximately 26 rpm (23 seconds for 10 rotations == 36.5 on the display of GFI’s large rotating table)
• wait for it to reach solid body rotation (ca 10 min)
• introduce dye upstream of the ridge,
• reduce rotation slightly, to approximately 23 rpm (26 seconds for 10 rotations == 33 on the display of GFI’s large rotating table) so the water inside the tank moves relative to the tank itself, and thus has to cross the ridge which is fixed to the tank
• watch it change from laminar flow to eddies downstream of the ridge. Hopefully ;-)