Kelvin-Helmholtz instability – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

#wavewatching in the sky

mglessmer — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 11:31:31 +0000

On Elin’s student cruise (read more about that here) very nice wave watching was to be had, both on the water as well as in the sky. In the picture below, if you look slightly left of the mountain top in the right of the picture, you see five parallel cloud stripes — evidence of […]

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Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities

mglessmer — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 18:08:26 +0000

I’m back at my happy place — the teaching lab at GFI in Bergen! :-) Here a quick look at what we’ve been doing today: Filling the large wave tank! With clear fresh water and then salty pink water that forms a layer below. As the pink water flows underneath the clear water, there is […]

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Totally not the focus of our experiments, but so beautiful! Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities

mglessmer — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 10:56:48 +0000

This is really not the focus of our experiments here in Grenoble, but they are too nice not to show: Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities! They showed up really nicely in our first experiment, when we only had neutrally-buoyant particles in our source water (and not yet in the ambient water). The water that shows up as the […]

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Shear flow

mglessmer — Mon, 02 Mar 2015 12:12:20 +0000

Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities in a shear flow in Elbe river. Last week I talked about how I wanted to use the “Elbe” model in teaching. Here is another idea for an exercise: On the picture below you see Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. They might be kinda hard to make out from the picture, but there is a movie below where […]

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Internal waves in the atmosphere

mglessmer — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 03:36:26 +0000

A photo of internal waves in the atmosphere. Internal waves exist on the interface between fluids of different densities. In the ocean they are mostly observed through their surface imprint. In the tank, we could also observe them by looking in from the side, but this is hardly feasible in the ocean. But luckily vision […]

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