tank experiment Archives - Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Finally published yesterday: “Student guides: supporting learning from laboratory experiments through across-course collaboration” by Daae et al. (2023)

October 7, 2023

A project near and dear to my heart is using the DIYnamics rotating tank experiments in across-course collaborations. “Older” students, who did experiments the previous year, are trained to then…

Learning together across courses — our iSSOTL presentation

November 4, 2021

Last week, Kjersti Daae and I gave a virtual presentation at the iSSOTL conference, and here is a short summary. We presented an ongoing teaching innovation project, funded by Olsen…

Solid body rotation

May 30, 2020

Several of my friends were planning on teaching with DIYnamics rotating tables right now. Unfortunately, that’s currently impossible. Fortunately, though, I have one at home and enjoy playing with it enough…

Thermal forcing vs rotation tank experiments in more detail than you ever wanted to know

May 25, 2020

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…

Thermal forcing vs rotation

May 23, 2020

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…

Ekman layers in my kitchen

May 21, 2020

Several of my friends were planning on teaching with DIYnamics rotating tables right now. Unfortunately, that’s currently impossible. Fortunately, though, I have one at home and enjoy playing with it enough…

Rossby-#WaveWatchingWednesday

May 20, 2020

Several of my friends were planning on teaching with DIYnamics rotating tables right now. Unfortunately, that’s currently impossible. Fortunately, though, I have one at home and enjoy playing with it enough…

Brine rejection and overturning, but not the way you think! Guest post by Robert Dellinger

April 16, 2020

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…

New rotating table on #FlumeFriday! Welcome to the family!

January 10, 2020

In addition to our four DIYnamics-inspired rotating tanks, we now have a highly professional rotating table with SO MANY options! And also so much unboxing and constructing and trouble-shooting to…

Thermally driven overturning circulation

November 21, 2019

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…

Planetary Rossby waves on Beta-plane. A super easy tank experiment!

September 13, 2019

This is seriously one of the easiest tank experiments I have ever run! And I have been completely overthinking it for the last couple of weeks. Quick reminder: This is…

Rossby waves in a rotating tank — three different demonstrations

September 10, 2019

For both of my tank experiment projects, in Bergen and in Kiel, we want to develop a Rossby wave demonstration. So here are my notes on three setups we are…

Tank demonstration of the circulation in a fjord

February 12, 2019

It has been a long time in the making, but finally we have a nice fjord circulation in our tank! Pierre and I tried to improve it 6 years ago,…

My first attempt at building a rotating table for kitchen oceanography using LEGO

January 27, 2019

Inspired by the article “Affordable Rotating Fluid Demonstrations for Geoscience Education: the DIYnamics Project” by the Hill et al. (2018), I spent a fun Sunday afternoon with my friends Joke and…

Need your help! “Wish list” for a student lab for tank experiments?

January 5, 2019

I’d love your input: If your student lab for GFD tank experiments had to downsize, but you had to present a “wish list” for a smaller replacement, what would be…

Lee waves with an asymmetrical “mountain”

October 25, 2018

How will lee waves look differently if we are using the asymmetrical mountain instead of the symmetric one? And is symmetry actually important at all or are we just looking…

Instructions: Lee wave demonstration in the GFI basement

October 24, 2018

This blog post is meant as guideline if someone other than me might have to set up this demonstration at some point… Have fun! :-) Lee waves Lee waves are…

Accidental double-diffusive mixing

October 19, 2018

When setting up the stratification for the Nansen “dead water” demo (that we’ll show later today, and until then I am not allowed to share any videos, sorry!), I went…

Observing waves in a tank

October 18, 2018

So you thought filling water into a tank was boring? Not on my watch! This is how we fill up the tank: Through a hole at the bottom. Which leads…

Experiment: Double-diffusive mixing (salt fingering)

August 24, 2018

On the coolest process in oceanography. My favorite oceanographic process, as all of my students and many of my acquaintances know, is double-diffusive mixing. Look at how awesome it is:…

Tank experiment: Lee waves in a fancy density (and dye) stratification

August 16, 2018

Did you seriously think we’d stop tank experiments with only 2-layer systems? Nooo! Today, the plan was to set up a continuous stratification, which I have been planning to do…

The one where it would help to understand the theory better (but still: awesome tank experiment!)

August 16, 2018

The main reason why we went to all the trouble of setting up a quasi-continuous stratification to pull our mountain through instead of sticking to the 2 layer system we…

Dead water — the fancy experiment including Nansen himself

August 16, 2018

Now that we do have a really awesome 12-layer 6-color stratification, we obviously had to do the dead water experiment again. This time we chose to include a not-too-happy-looking Nansen…

“Dead water” or: ship-generated internal waves

August 16, 2018

And here is another experiment that can be done with the same stratification as the lee waves: Towing a ship to explore the phenomenon of “dead water”! Dead water is…

Lee waves in the tank

August 15, 2018

Did you guess what we needed the stratification for? Yes — we are moving mountains again! :-) What we want to look at: How a current reacts to an obstacle…

Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities

August 15, 2018

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!…

Experiment: Oceanic overturning circulation (the easiest version)

August 10, 2018

“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…

Experiment: Eddy in a jar

August 6, 2018

Rotating experiments in your kitchen. Eddies, those large, rotating structures in the ocean, are pretty hard to imagine. Of course, you can see them on many different scales, so you…

Experiment: Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water

July 23, 2018

Explore how melting of ice cubes floating in water is influenced by the salinity of the water. Important oceanographic concepts like density and density driven currents are visualized and can…

Why we actually need a large tank — similarity requirements of a hydrodynamic model

September 26, 2017

When talking about oceanographic tank experiments that are designed to show features of the real ocean, many people hope for tiny model oceans in a tank, analogous to the landscapes…

Standing waves in a tank

February 13, 2015

And really high order ones, too! On Monday, I showed you a movie on wave generation in Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA)’s wave tank. At the end of that movie, we…

Stokes drift

February 11, 2015

When a higher-order effect suddenly becomes important. During our excursion to Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA), one of the experiments we ran was on Stokes drift. You can already see in that post’s…

Wave tank

February 9, 2015

Excursion to Hamburg Ship Model Basin. I recently got to join a class on their excursion to Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA, “Hamburgische Schiffbau-Versuchsanstalt” klingt so viel besser!). Those are amazing facilities…

Eddies in a jar

January 28, 2015

Rotating experiments in your kitchen. Do you know those Saturday mornings when you wake up and just know that you have to do oceanography experiments? I had one of those…

Creating a continuous stratification in a tank, using the double bucket filling method

September 19, 2014

Because I am getting sick of stratifications not working out the way I planned them. Creating stratifications, especially continuous stratifications, is a pain. Since I wanted a nice stratification for an…

Simulations of hetonic explosions

September 10, 2014

Because sometimes it’s easier to control a computer than rotation, salinity, water and dye. After looking at a non-rotating cylinder collapse the other day, it is time to look at…

Collapsing column

September 8, 2014

Or: This is what happens to a hetonic explosion experiment without rotation. I’ve posted a lot while at JuniorAkademie a while back, so it is hard to believe there are still experiments…

Double overflow

August 30, 2014

Because sometimes one overflow simply isn’t enough. Finn’s group came up with – and ran – an overflow experiment with many different densities and even more colors. While the movie didn’t…

Cylinder collapse on a cone

August 29, 2014

Water running uphill during spin-down – how much more awesome can it get? After hours, when all but the most curious students had left, Rolf and I ran another collapsing…

Salt fingering

August 28, 2014

My absolute favorite experiment ever: salt fingering. I know I’ve said it before about another experiment, even today, but this is my absolute favorite experiment and I still get endlessly…

Hetonic explosion

August 28, 2014

Trying to tweak conditions to force a set number of vortices. We’ve done the hetonic explosion again. This time the group was super careful to calculate the Rossby radius correctly,…

Thermally driven circulation

August 28, 2014

One of my all-time favorite experiments. The salt group got a bit bored from watching ice cubes melt, so I suggested they look at temperature differences for a change, and…

Overflows

August 27, 2014

The unavoidable tank experiment when playing with Rolf ;-) After the first attempt – embarrassingly shown by the instructors – failed miserably, one of our groups ran the overflow experiment successfully.…

Mixing in a non-stratified and in a stratified tank

August 27, 2014

A wind stress is applied to the surface to cause mixing. This is an experiment that I have been wanting to do for a long time, but somehow it never…

Waves and sandbanks

August 25, 2014

Creating waves in a tank. (deutscher Text unten) In the big tank, we have a paddle that is really good for making big waves. And if you create them in just…

Hadley cell experiment

August 25, 2014

Cooling and rotation combined. (deutscher Text unten) I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this experiment before now! Pierre and I have conducted it a number of times, but somehow…

Hetonic explosion

August 24, 2014

Or, an experiment on this blog often known as “slumping column”. (deutscher Text unten) If you don’t scale your tilting of frontal surfaces under rotation experiment correctly, you get a phenomenon…

Forced internal waves in a continuous stratification

August 24, 2014

Plus all kinds of dyes. (deutscher Text unten) Using the continuous salinity stratification created yesterday, Rolf and Daniel conducted a really cool experiment: They forced internal waves and watched them…

Creating a continuous stratification.

August 23, 2014

And watching internal waves – a data-model comparison. (deutscher Text unten) In an experiment similar to the one done by the group looking at the effects of temperature and salinity…

Effects of temperature and salinity on density and stratification

August 23, 2014

Removing a barrier between waters of different densities and watching what happens. (deutscher Text unten) Today, one of the groups performed a classical experiment (shown for example here) – but…

Tides in a rotating tank

August 23, 2014

A first attempt where gravity (due to a tilted axis of rotation) replaces the pull of the moon. (deutscher Text unten) The movie contains both a view from a co-rotating…

Why we absolutely need toy boats at the JuniorAkademie

August 23, 2014

Luckily I’m not the only one believing that we absolutely need remotely controlled boats! – Zum Glück bin ich nicht die Einzige, die findet, dass wir ferngesteuerte Boote brauchen! Mein…

Thermally-driven overturning circulation

August 23, 2014

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).…

Tilting of a frontal surface under rotation

July 11, 2014

Eddy in a rotating tank. This is an experiment that Pierre and I ran two years ago in Bergen but that – as I just realized – has not been…

Modeling the Denmark Strait Overflow

February 24, 2014

Ha, this is a bad pun. We are modeling the Denmark Strait Overflow – but in a non-numerical, small-scale-and-playdough kind of way. More than a year ago, Kjetil and I ran…

Rogue waves in a bath tub

November 29, 2013

Trying to create rogue waves in the bath tub of the infamous “red house”. As a part of their projects, students in the CMM31 in Isafjördur course had to conduct…

Velocity of shallow water waves.

November 15, 2013

The experiment we run to discuss the velocity of shallow water waves. In this post, I discussed how it took us several years to modify an experiment to make it…

Seesawing of standing waves.

November 13, 2013

Improving one of the experiments run in the GEOF130 lab. One experiment that has been run in GEOF130 forever is the “standing wave”, where a wave is excited in a…

Water seeks its level.

November 4, 2013

A solution for the siphon problem of the fjord circulation experiment. After having run the fjord circulation experiments for several years in a row with several groups of students each…

Fjord circulation

November 1, 2013

Tank experiment on a typical circulation in a fjord. Traditionally, a fjord circulation experiment has been done in GEOF130’s student practicals. Pierre and I recently met up to test-run the…

Details of lee waves in the tank.

September 21, 2013

A movie focusing on details of the lee waves in the tank. In this post, we investigated lee waves in a tank in a general way. Here, I want to…

Surface imprints of internal waves

September 20, 2013

How internal waves in the ocean can be spotted on the surface. Under certain conditions, internal waves in the ocean can be spotted at the ocean’s surface due to changes…

Internal (lee) waves in a tank.

September 19, 2013

Lee wave experiment in a large tank with a moving mountain. In this previous post, we talked about internal waves in a very simple experiment. But Geophysical Institute has a great…

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