Tag: overturning

This is the long version of the two full “low latitude, laminar, tropical Hadley circulation” and “baroclinic instability, eddying, extra-tropical circulation” experiments. A much shorter version (that also includes the end cases “no rotation” and “no thermal forcing”) can be found here. Several of my friends were planning on teaching with DIYnamics rotating tables right now. […]

The first experiment we ever ran with our DIYnamics rotating tank was using a cold beer bottle in the center of a rotating tank full or lukewarm water. This experiment is really interesting because, depending on the rotation of the tank, it will display different regimes. For small rotations we get a low latitude, laminar, tropical […]

It’s #KitchenOceanography season! For example in Prof. Tessa M Hill‘s class at UC Davis. Last week, her student Robert Dellinger posted a video of an overturning circulation on Twitter that got me super excited (not only because as of now, April 15th, it has 70 retweets and 309 likes. That’s orders of magnitude more successful than any […]

You might have noticed them in yesterday’s thermally driven overturning video: salt fingers! In the image below you see them developing in the far left: Little red dye plumes moving down into the clear water. But wait, where is the salt? In this case, the “double” in double diffusion comes from heat and dye which […]

Today was the second day of tank experiments in Torge’s and my “dry theory 2 juicy reality” teaching innovation project. While that project is mainly about bringing rotating tanks into the theoretical teaching of ocean and atmosphere dynamics, today we started with the non-rotating case of a thermally driven overturning circulation. Very easy setup: A […]

Setting up an overturning circulation in a tank is easy, and also interpreting the observations is fairly straightforward. Just by introducing cooling on one side of a rectangular tank a circulation is induced (at least for a short while until the tank fills up with a cold pool of water; see left plot of the […]

The experiment presented on this page is called the “slightly more complicated version” because it builds on the experiment “oceanic overturning circulation (the easiest version)” here. Background One of the first concepts people hear about in the context of ocean and climate is the “great conveyor belt”. The great conveyor belt is a very simplified concept of the […]

“The easiest” in the title of this page is to show the contrast to a “slightly more complicated” version here. Background One of the first concepts people hear about in the context of ocean and climate is the “great conveyor belt”. The great conveyor belt is a very simplified concept of the global ocean circulation, which is depicted as […]

In my last post, I showed you the legendary overturning experiment. And guess what occurred to me? That there is an even easier way to show the same thing. No gel pads! (BUT! And that is a BIG BUT! Melting of ice cubes in lukewarm water is NOT the process that drives the “real” overturning! For […]

For one of my side-projects I needed higher-resolution photos of the overturning experiment, so I had to redo it. Figured I’d share them with you, too. You know the experiment: gel pads for sports injuries, one hot (here on the left), one cold (here on the right). Blue dye on the cold pad to mark the […]

Cooling on one end of the tank, heating on the other: A temperature-driven overturning. [deutscher Text unten] Always one of my favorite experiments – the overturning experiment (and more, and more). Unsere “Klima und Strömungen”-Gruppe hat heute ausprobiert, wie man in einem Tank eine Umwälzströmung erzeugen kann, indem man an einem Ende wärmt und am anderen […]

By popular demand: A step-by-step description of the overturning experiment discussed here and here. I wrote this description a while ago and can’t be bothered to transfer it into the blog format, so please go and find a .pdf here. This .pdf addresses young children in the first part, and grown-ups in the second part. […]

How to adapt the same experiment to different levels of prior knowledge. In this post, I presented an experiment that I have run in a primary school, with high-school pupils, in a Bachelor-level course and in a Master-level course. The experiment itself was run identically in all cases. However, the introductions, explanations and discussions about […]

A simple experiment that shows how the large-scale thermally-driven ocean circulation works. Someone recently asked me whether I had ideas for experiments for her course in ocean sciences for non-majors. Since most of the experiments I’ve been showing on this blog were run in the context of Bachelor or Master oceanography-major courses, she didn’t think […]