swell – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Christina’s #FriendlyWaves from Panama!

mglessmer — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 19:02:27 +0000

Christina writes on Twitter: “#wavewatching from a plane, approaching #Panama. @Meermini, do you know what causes those regular ‘wrinkles’?” and how could I resist writing a blog post about what I think might be the explanation? Below is the picture Christina shared on Twitter. What I think we see here are basically two wave fields: […]

Source

Night swimming… or at least night-time wave watching

mglessmer — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 21:15:52 +0000

Looking at Kiel fjord in the picture below, it is quite obvious from the shape of the waves that those waves are some ship’s wake. Why is that obvious? Because the waves a) have a very short wavelength for their height, and b) are also all of the same wavelength. What I mean by that […]

Source

Swell and wind waves

mglessmer — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 09:57:26 +0000

Sometimes waves are very regular and mostly of the same length. Those are the ones that I usually talk about when I talk about interference of waves. But of course, other times, there are different kinds of waves with different histories and different lengths, and those do interfere, too. For example in the picture below, […]

Source