Taylor column – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Collaborative Taylor column experiments during lockdown

mglessmer — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:40:19 +0000

We’ve become quite experienced with remotely-controlled rotating tank experiments, but the current lockdown brought us into yet another new-to-us situation: We had plans to film and live-stream tank experiments from Geomar, but not being employed there, I am currently not allowed in the building! So what happened this morning is that Torge and I met […]

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Taylor column in rheoscopic fluid

mglessmer — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:29:22 +0000

I have a slightly complicated history with Taylor column experiments — even though the experiments look fine compared to all other videos I’ve found online, I somehow always had higher expectations. But now I’ve tried doing the experiment in a rheoscopic fluid (approximately 2cm of it over the hockey puck) and it looks a whole lot […]

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Taylor column

mglessmer — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 13:05:12 +0000

I was super keen on trying the Taylor column experiment, but maybe I expected things to look too much like my sketch below, or my technique isn’t quite perfect yet, but in any case, the results don’t look as good as I had hoped. This is the setup I was aiming for: put ice hockey […]

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

mglessmer — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 04:15:16 +0000

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 what we think hope will happen: On a slope, melt water from a dyed ice cube will sink, creating a Taylor column that will be driven […]

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Taylor column in a rotating tank

mglessmer — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 04:55:46 +0000

For both of my tank experiment projects, in Bergen and in Kiel, we want to develop a Taylor column demonstration. So here are my notes on the setup we are considering, but before actually having tried it. Since water under rotation becomes rigid, funny things can happen. For example if a current in a rotating […]

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Combining rotation of a water tank with a temperature gradient: A Hadley cell circulation demo!

mglessmer — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 12:05:38 +0000

Yesterday, we combined a thermally-driven overturning circulation with the effects of rotation, and thus created a Hadley cell circulation. And while the tank was turning faster than we would have liked, we still managed to create a circulation that largely resembles the sketch below: An axially-symmetric overturning circulation (with cold water, indicated by blue arrows, […]

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