Last week I went to beautiful Lüneburg with a group of climate scientists to continue working on a very exciting project I’ve been involved in over the last year or so (see “scales in the climate system” funded by CliSAP here). I so enjoyed being with a group of people who talk about converging solutions of discretized differential equations over dinner! I have really spent way too little time with people like that ever since I left oceanographic research and went for instructional design. So it was great to discover that I haven’t lost that side of my life but that I can still happily talk about climate models and eddy covariance measurements!

But the “continuity” in the title of this post is actually referring to something else which I saw during a break we took. In the picture above you see the river going through Lüneburg, which is clearly going downhill, just like every good river should. You also see a couple of fronts, so clearly something is going on there. Watch:

[vimeo 138396707]

I find it super fascinating. Where does the water that comes down the wide waterfall go to if the sea grass (hey, I’m not a biologist! You know, the green stuff in the river!) is going towards the waterfall, too? Is there a vertical circulation involved? But then where does the water actually sink? Yet it doesn’t really look like it could all go in the current along the front. What is going on there?

Isn’t it weird how I always look for continuity? :-)