Tag Archives: interaction

Early morning wave watching. Nothing quite like it :-)

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Occasionally working from home is awesome for many reasons, but mainly because I can use the time usually spent on commuting on … wait for it … wave watching. With my cup of coffee so I can warm up my fingers in between taking tons of pictures.

But I just love it. See below how the seagull is making waves where it is swimming, but is surrounded by a much larger circle, too, that it started when it landed on the water?

And especially gorgeous in the morning light: The reflections of sunlit structures on the water. The pier you see above gets distorted into something like this:

And if you look closely, you see the ring waves radiating from where the pylons disturb the water surface as waves go by.

I absolutely love to watch how the much longer waves can cause these ring waves with such a short wave length, and how they are deformed again by the waves that caused them. I can look at this for a long time without getting bored, it is so calming to me! Especially in the early morning light.

But anyway, time to start working. Have a great day everybody!

Wavelength dependency of wave-object-interactions

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Wavelength dependency of wave-object-interactions. What a title! :-) But that is exactly what I observed over the enormous timespan of three full minutes (as shown by the time stamps of my camera) when I went strolling along Kiel Fjord one Saturday morning.

First, I saw this old, overgrown tyre in a wave field that was dominated by small wind waves. We clearly see how they are diffracted around the tyre and how there is a nice interference pattern downwind of the tyre (to the left in the picture below).

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Tyre in the Kiel Fjord and diffraction of small wind waves around it, leading to a beautiful interference pattern to the left of the tyre

Also I quite like how there are absolutely no waves inside the tire, where the wind is shaded off by the tyre and the stuff growing on it.

Then, a really short while later, the wave field was dominated by longer waves running in from the distance. Below, we still see remnants of the old interference pattern to the left of the tyre, but also how the longer waves run around it. In the picture below, the wave crest that was broken up by the tyre is about to rejoin.

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And then, only an instant later, this is what the wave field looked like. Hardly and ripples caused by local wind, but many short waves. No real interaction between tyre and waves visible any more.

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Isn’t that fascinating? And it all happened within three minutes! :-)

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