Tag Archives: #WaveWatchingWednesday

#WaveWatchingWednesday

Leave a reply

A week’s worth of #WaveWatching pictures for you. Enjoy!

Starting off strong: I love living in Kiel!

Totally different vibe the next morning, looking very winter-y somehow.

And then another early morning on my way to the beach. Below you see the locks on Kiel canal from the bridge that crosses the channel. I really love this view but I have to admit — if the ferry ran this early in the morning already, I’d totally take it to cross the channel rather than cycling that bridge!

But arriving at the beach always makes it worth it!

Taking the ferry back home… Love this picture! A turbulent wake, a feathery wake, those clouds… What more could anyone want?

….and we are back on the next day! Waves breaking pretty much right on the beach because the beach profile has a step shape right at the water line. Looks surreal to have those long smooth waves, than a tiny bit of breaking, then nothing but sand…

All those bubbles in the white water of the breaking waves!

I actually took the picture below because of the birds’ wakes in the center. Weird how it turned out!

And here is one just because it’s pretty!

Always surprising how many fossils there are on the beach, even though this is the 5th day in 8 days of me collecting on the really short stretch from there to the lighthouse! How many more are hiding underneath our feet and we’ll never know?

Took a very similar picture as on the day before, but I love all the different parts of the wake, the clouds, the reflections. So beautiful and calming.

Running, seal watching, swimming in Kiel fjord, now my well-deserved coffee. Have a nice Sunday everybody!

On Monday, a colleague from GEO visited me to do an interview on wave watching. Amazing day!

Taking the ferry & admiring the wakes. Isn’t it fascinating for how long turbulence persists & wipes out any waves / prevents formation of new waves? Love the different surface textures!

Also fascinating how differently wakes look depending on weather conditions!

Love how dramatic this looks!

…and how turbulent patches are so smooth and reflect the building so well. And then a sharp boundary and we are back to the normal surface roughness of wind waves!

I can’t get over how fascinating this is!

Also love the pictures for their beauty. Below: After we had arrived at a stop, the ferry has just started sailing again (see where the wake changes between smooth and turbulent and then those large eddies of the propeller rotating for propulsion?)

Very nice pattern in the waves this morning, showing constructive interference (where the crests are high and the troughs are low) and destructive interference in between where the surface is completely flat. So fun to watch!

And that’s it! Hope you enjoyed and hope it inspires you to do some wave watching yourself! :-)

#WaveWatchingWednesday

Leave a reply

Ooops, long time no see! But even though I haven’t posted a #WaveWatchingWednesday on my blog in a while, I’ve still been active over on Instagram.

These are the last pictures I took on a beach walk before going to visit my family (sadly far away from the sea ;-))

After being away from Kiel and mostly offline for a week, I saw this beautiful swan family one morning, leaving wakes in the wind waves that in some spots reflect the sky, in others let us look into the water (never thought back in physics class that partial reflection would be something that actually had any real world relevance). So much beauty in nature, and such cool physics!

And some cool wave watching the next day: Are they coming? Are they going? The answer is both — or neither. The waves reflected at the seawall run directly into uncoming waves (both of the exact same wavelength) such that a standing wave develops. Where two wave crests or troughs meet, the crest is twice as high (or the trough twice as low) as for only one wave. But where a crest and a trough meet, they cancel out exactly in destructive interference. And that leads to this weird wave field!

Wakes, but only one of them has a bird at the tip of the V? What’s going on? Carps, apparently! :D

Next, there was another trip to the beach.

Nice to see how waves get bent around that groyne!

 

Why is the surface roughness changing in the shallow water where all of a sudden the surface gets smoother while the waves get higher?
Waves get higher as they run into shallow water & start interacting with the bottom. And it’s full of stuff growing in the water there, taking energy out of the wave field such that only longer waves remain visible.

…And by the time I had whipped my phone out of my pocket, the bird was gone. But what was left — even if only for a really short time, before they disappeared, too — was even more fascinating to me. Those waves! You see them mainly in the pattern of light and dark on the seafloor. Only looking out further into the water do we start seeing a reflection of the sky, too… Dreamy!

Ha! All this mud in the water at the very top of the pic? That’s where the water is shallow enough for waves to stirr up the ground! See how it gets so much clearer if you only look a little bit further away from the coast where the water is slightly deeper?

Not even the seagull is enjoying the fog…

Even though it might not look like it, I am very happy I decided to use the 20 min between calls to bring my coffee & run to the water!

It’s funny how even a tiny little peak of the sea makes me instantly happy :)

#wavewatchingmakes me happy :)

What a beautiful pattern in the waves & light again :) Wave field reflected at the sea wall and interference forming a checkerboard-like pattern in the waves. Beautiful! :)

125 years of Kiel canal today! One of my favourite wave watching spots. Even without ships it’s interesting — see how windy it is? Looks like there is Langmuir circulation developing which you see by those rows of foam in downwind direction.

A ship being tugged around in a narrow canal before all that wake action in the next pictures can happen. Quite interesting to watch!

Interesting ship watching today: first a nice wake, then a lot of mud being stirred up in the turbulent wake! I’ve never noticed that as clearly before.

One last wake. Because it’s so beautiful. And because I find the structure absolutely fascinating. A V, consisting of individual wavelets, with a boat at its tip. And the waves filling the space in between the wavelets. Then the turbulent wake right in the middle, showing the ship’s trajectory. So simple, yet so complex. Totally and utterly fascinated!

And another beautiful wake. The wavelets of one side of the V are about to reach the shore, the turbulent wake still shows where the pilot boat came out of its berth and sailed towards the locks.

Interestingly, of all the wave pics I send to my sisters & a couple of friends every day, this picture got the most positive reactions in weeks. Which I find hilarious. The one day where there is nothing to see on the water in terms of wave watching and physics, and I have to fall back on taking pictures of other people’s boating houses, people get excited? Really?

And btw, it’s not that I don’t think this boat house thingy is pretty. But don’t you agree that it’s so much more interesting with a little wave action going on (as compared to yesterday’s pic)?

Oh look, that seagull made such pretty waves. Just love the sunshine that they focus on the ground, and the reflection of the bird. What would I do without water?

Accidental #WaveWatching in my coffee. You are welcome! :D
(This was actually part of an experiment that I was hoping would show something completely different… ;))

Always cool to see how waves become both taller and steeper as they run into shallow water, until they tuble and eventually break on the beach

Have you ever wondered about the physics of splashing waves? A wave travelling towards the beach, hitting a rock, and then water and foam going flying everywhere? I am pretty fascinated by the conversion of energy going on in these cases, would you have thought there was so much energy in a simple wave?

Time for another “seriously. How can water be flying this high up just because a small wave hit a small rock???” moment. Isn’t physics amazingly counterintuitive?

Next, I went and posted my first IGTV video! It’s the “turbulence in rotating and non-rotating fluids ones” that you probably know already… ;-) But curious to see how it’s being taken up!

And that’s it for now. Happy wave watching, everybody!

Rossby-#WaveWatchingWednesday

2 Replies

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 that I’m

  1. Playing with it
  2. Making videos of me playing with it
  3. Putting the videos on the internet
  4. Going to do video calls with my friends’ classes, so that the students can at least “remote control” the hands-on experiments they were supposed to be doing themselves.

Here is me introducing the setup:

Today, I want to share a video I filmed on planetary Rossby waves. To be clear: This is not a polished, stand-alone teaching video. It’s me rambling while playing. It’s supposed to give students an initial idea of an experiment we’ll be doing together during a video call, and that they’ll be discussing in much more depth in class. It’s also meant to prepare them for more “polished” videos, which are sometimes so polished that it’s hard to actually see what’s going on. If everything looks too perfect it almost looks artificial, know what I mean? Anyway, this is as authentic as it gets, me playing in my kitchen. Welcome! :-)

In the video, I am using an ice cube, melting on a sloping bottom in a rotating tank, to create planetary Rossby waves. Follow along with the whole process:

Also check out the video below that shows both a top- and side view of a planetary Rossby wave, both filmed with co-rotating cameras.

Previous blog posts with more movies for example here.

Now. What are you curious about? What would you like to try? What would you do differently? Any questions for me? :-)

#WaveWatchingWednesday

Leave a reply

Reposting all of last week’s posts from my #WaveWatching Instagram @fascinocean_kiel. Enjoy!

Lovely morning with wave watching and all the trees in full bloom. Hope you have a nice day! :)

This very climate-stripe-y looking morning is a great example for different surface roughnesses reflecting different parts of the sky towards us, thus showing up in very different colors!

So despite my Corona hair (almost ready for a buzz cut, I tell you!) I really like this picture. Somewhere in the background is a harbor porpoise, the weather is beautiful, I have my coffee with me. Life is good! I am so lucky to be living in a place where I can go be near water every day without breaking isolation. There are few things that make me as happy as seeing water (although right now on the very top of my wish list: hanging out with my super awesome and hilarious and adorable nieces ❤️). Hope you are all doing well!

Ok, I might be weird. But when I wake up before sunrise I absolutely have to go & watch. And isn’t it beautiful?

#waveriddle for you: What just happened???

#Schmetterlingsflieder. Sieht doch schon fast wieder aus wie Sommer in Kiel!

Criss cross pattern due to waves being reflected on the sea wall, plus wakes of those three ducks. So much #wavewatching in one picture!

#SciComm at a #campsite? What a great idea! People are not in a hurry and most likely happy for something stimulating to think about! Like why does the water have different shades of blue, both right now and from day to day?⁠
⁠
On my blog, I discuss a recent article by Woolman (2020) on why campsites might be a great place for scicomm. Check it out this #SciCommSunday!⁠
⁠
This picture was of course not taken recently, as campsites are currently closed down. But here at @localwindheroes in Klein Waabs both I and some of my favourite @KiSOC_Kiel colleagues have done scicomm and our verdict? Works great, should be repeated! Until then we look forward to summer and re-opened campsites!

I love watching the play of light in the waves and on the sea floor. Here showing beautifully how wave rings radiate from where the larger rocks break the surface.

Is this Day 2 of @biologiedidaktikerin-approved summer in Kiel?

Only if you look very closely can you spot that seagull’s wake in the choppy waves today

Windy sunrise today, and a great example of how the water’s surface needs to be at the exact right angle for the sun to be reflected towards us

With windy days comes one of my favourite phenomena: a foam stripe running parallel to the sea wall. But not right at the sea wall, but at some distance to it. Very fascinating! :)