Welcome to another #WaveWatchingWednesday post, where you get all of last week’s wave watching pics from my Instagram @fascinocean_kiel in one go! Let’s get started:

Fascinating how different parts of the water look so different. Some dark because areas are more rough because there are wind-generated ripples and waves there.
Other areas are brighter because their smoother surface reflects the clouds lit by the raising sun.
And then again darker areas closer to us where we can actually look into the water and make out structures on the seafloor. Only when looking at water at a steep angle can we look inside, because of a phenomenon called “total reflection”. It’s this kind of stuff we learn about in high school where nobody tells us what it’ll be relevant for in real life. Wave watching, duh!

I’m always fascinated by the different wavelengths of the waves vs the sand ripples. How come the ripples are so much shorter? One of these days I will really have to read up on this…

Another amazing sunrise this morning, making it very clear that when you want to determine water color as one measure for water quality, you really need to pay attention to how you do it. What you see here is not what you want to measure :D

Beautiful checkerboard pattern in waves & their reflections. And can you spot the birds’ wakes?

Forget about the sky; I can’t get over how colorful the water looks this morning with each of the small waves reflecting both the orange sunrise side and the dark westside!

Not so common to see wakes these days, especially this early in the morning! Makes me appreciate even more how pretty they look meeting up with their reflections & forming the checkerboard pattern!

Luckily my wave watching senses are so well developed that I caught these beautiful waves when I was already on my way back home.
First pic shows them arriving just before hitting the sea wall, second pic a little later shows the interference of the original and reflected wave field. Can you spot the areas where constructive interference makes wave crests especially high?

This is, btw, what I did this month’s scicommchall on, so check out that post if you want to know more!

And then: finally some more #KitchenOceanography! Check out the blog post for that picture here.

Another beautiful orange morning, but you already see the fog creeping in.

Waves are so incredibly fascinating to me. Look at these ducks’ wakes. You can spot the turbulent part where they’ve been paddling, stirring up the water, and the wavelets that form the feathery V-shaped wake. In this light and with hardly any other waves around, the intricate details are clearly visible. And even though under most other conditions they aren’t as clearly visible, they are always there, disguised by other waves. How amazing is that?

Wave watching in the fog: I love the criss cross pattern of waves & their reflections!

And bonus pics that I didn’t post on my Instagram yet but I find so fascinating: How come the ripples go through all these clearly distinct regimes? (There is water on top, but hardly any waves, so you can’t actually see the water)

And now: Ripples in the sand and on the water! :-)

Next: More #KitchenOceanography, check out Tuesday’s blog post to learn more about what Elin and I are up to!

#WaveWatching! :-)

And then today is all about #KitchenOceanography again, as I am contributing today’s input to an online vacation program about STEM (in German, sorry).

And I love how spring is here! :-)

Here’s another #WaveWatchingWednesday overview over my Instagram @fascinocean_kiel! Enjoy!

Sun glint can be so helpful to make waves visible more clearly, like this morning. I love the combination of the turbulent wake, the feathery usually V-shaped (and in this case quite wonky) wake, the sun. Always fun to watch!

Just moments later and the feathery wonky V is a lot more difficult to recognize (its remnants are reaching the shore at the very bottom of the picture). But the turbulent wake looks a lot more interesting now with that cloud-like appearance!

And one last look at the billows of the turbulent wake. I mean it’s quite impressive for such a large ship to do a 180 turn in such a narrow fjord. But it’s also really cool to see it like this, documented in the wave field!

Oh, and then I did some #FriendlyWaves for Christina on a super cool picture taken from a plane off Panama. Check it out!

…And a little wave watching on my way to work!

Another week, another #WaveWatchingWednesday! Here are my collected Instagram posts from my wave watching Insta @fascinocean_kiel.

Even quick glimpses of water make me happy: #WaveWatching from the train! And even from the train, we see gusts of wind as darker, rougher patches of the water.

This is what a storm flood looks like at low tide. #fail. Somehow my work schedule and the tidal cycle didn’t match well today…

I always love mornings at the water side!

Clearly the sheltered side of the fjord today with long waves coming in from somewhere else, but hardly anything happening locally here. But higher surface roughness on the other side as can be seen from a darkening towards the horizon!

But: nice waves in the atmosphere today! Cloud stripes are often due to air oscillating up and down and clouds forming and disappearing as atmospheric conditions change with height. Check out all three pics to see those cloud stripes from different angles!

Today: slightly more water than normal, hence the swimming pool where the rigid part of the pier is flooded between the two pontons.

Can you spot the turbulent wake of where the ferry just sailed out of the picture to the right? It’s the very bright stripe across the water. On the left side of the picture you see a line of darker “feathers” of the V-shaped feathery wake (you know, the V with the ship at its tip, the 2D Mach cone…).

Also very nicely visible today: Lots of reflected waves everywhere, especially parallel to the straight edges of those harbour basins. Weird mixture of no wind (thus smooth water surface) yet enough waves to cause these reflections. But also maybe just the right water level so waves hit a ledge that is always just slightly submerged and then falls dry, thus causing those waves. Who knows? I’m just guessing, didn’t bother looking at it closely enough to find out…

Saturday stroll. These cliffs change a lot over time — se how the old footpath is gone?

Watching gusts of wind play on the water

Tide lines on the beach

Waves getting bent towards the shore

Good morning on this windy Sunday! Fascinating to watch how even over relatively short distances of open water there is such a transfer of energy to make waves this size!

Sneak peak at powertools making eddies! That’s going to be some awesome #KitchenOceanography for @sciencenotes5x15 when it’s done! Picture will then be by @davidcarrenohansen and will look quite differently! I’m just documenting the “making of” here because who would not be curious about that? :D

Plastic cubes and freezer frost standing in for fresh water and salt water ice in a #KitchenOceanography photography concept test for @sciencenotes5x15. Very curious what a professional photographer, @davidcarrenohansen, will make out of my experiments!

And that’s it for last week’s wave watching! Have you done any wave watching lately? If not, you should definitely take it up some time!

Another recap of a week on my wave watching Instagram @fascinocean_kiel. Enjoy!

Best thing for my mental health: Running along the waterfront. Bonus if it includes wave watching as it does today: See how in the reflections of the lights there are zones where the water is almost mirror-like (those are the sad zones: no waves) and then there are dark zones with hardly any lights reflected (where the breeze roughs up the surface) and then there are those in-between zones, where you can see individual waves. Lovely evening!⁠

How is it that I am sooo happy to be home and at the same time this view makes me long to be back at sea?⁠

Meetings at GEOMAR are always a welcome opportunity for me to take the slightly longer way along Kiel fjord for some wave watching. Today see how waves close to the boat house have a completely different direction than those closer to the shore?

That’s because the ones closer to the shore are the reflection of the other wave field.

This might not be so surprising to people who don’t look at Kiel fjord as much as I am, but what is the Sweden ferry doing there? Why is it turning on its way into port rather than out? The seagull seems as confused as I am… :-D

But: enough reason for more wave watching (not that I ever need more reasons to wave watch than just wanting to do it…). This corner between the sea wall and the solid structure of the pier is always great for reflections and interferences! Can you spot the two wave fields, the original and reflected one?

Well hello, thanks for making these beautiful waves for me, little buddy!

A wake approaching the pier! How do I know? Because there isn’t any wind here (which I could feel, but which you can also see because there are no ripples on the water) and the wavelengths are too short (and the waves too far in the fjord) for the waves to have traveled here from a distant storm somewhere in the Baltic.

Also, if you quickly turn your head (or look down to the next pic), you can juuust catch the Sweden ferry disappearing around the corner into the mouth of the fjord — she’s the one who made the wake (and it only arrived at the shore when she was already this much further along!).

Good morning!

This is an interesting wave field: Inside the inner harbour, therefore relatively sheltered from the wind and big waves. Yet windy enough to create all these ripples on the waves that made it into the harbour! (And don’t you just love the sun? Yep, yesterday’s picture…)

Lovely day for a swim in the sun! And with such bright light, reflections on the surface are so strong that you can’t look into the water from this angle (which you could on the picture I posted a couple of days ago on an overcast day!)

Here the waves making it into the sheltered, inner harbour are reflected on the straight edge of the sea wall and make this beautiful, very regular wave field. See the ring waves radiating from that pole? The thing in the lower left corner is some reflection on my phone’s lens, it’s not on the water…

Love the tiny ripples on the waves, and the contrast between the “sea state” outside and inside the harbour basin!

And this is what it looks like when you look from the edge of the harbour basin downwind. From the right, waves are travelling around the edge of the wall, but new wave ripples only start forming quite some distance downwind of the wall!

For comparison: Looking into a similar direction from a pier that rests on poles and lets the waves run through underneath almost undisturbed…

Storm Sabine is making waves!

Monday’s “pop up beach” pictures (the strong west winds had pushed the water far out of Kiel Bight!) are in a separate blog post…

But then Tuesday: Windy day again! Can you spot the different wave fields? I see three:
1️⃣The long waves with crests more or less parallel to the shore that come out of Kiel fjord
2️⃣The short waves with crests perpendicular to the shore that come from the direction of Kiel locks and sneak around the corner
3️⃣The wind wave field that is generated right here: smooth surface right off the shore that then becomes rougher and rougher the longer the fetch gets
Unfortunately I missed the white caps (or, to be honest, I preferred to watch from the inside & didn’t take pictures when the weather was really interesting, hail and all…

Here is another #WaveWatchingWednesday with last week’s recap of my wave watching Insta @fascinocean_kiel! Enjoy!

Opening my mom’s fridge, I went „WHAT IS THAT SUPER AWESOME LAYERED SAUCE???“. Turns out this was accidental #KitchenOceanography. The sauce was blended when it went into the fridge, then separated and formed layers. Density stratification!
Unfortunately I have to report that the internal wave experiment (that obviously had to happen!) didn’t go so well, too much damping. Layers just veeery slowly return back to horizontal…

The flood is coming in quickly! Most waves reach further in than the one before did, thus reshaping the look of the beach. Footsteps of dozens of people enjoying their stroll — first just blurred a little, then soon gone completely. Covered in foam, shells, then water. Until, a couple of hours later, the water recedes again, each wave leaving fresh, smooth sand for someone to be the first to have walked on that part of the beach, until the whole beach is covered in footprints again. Am I the only one who finds this strangely poetic?

My sister pointed out the waves from the fountain on the left meeting the wind waves coming in from the right, and that ended up being almost as exciting as a bunch of lambs born only the night before!

Not wave watching, but how cute are these little lambs???

#WaveWatchingFromTheTrain

I really like this view of Hamburg!

Finally! Back home to blue skies and wave watching! Today: seaward winds, thus hardly any waves on this side of Kiel fjord. But can you see the breeze offshore where the sea surface looks rougher?

Sunny lunch break!

Oh a seagull making waves!
But what causes the waves that seem to be radiating from the lower right corner of the picture? Check out the next pic!

It’s other waves from a distant ship ⛵️hitting the corner where the beach meets the seawall and radiating from there!

And that’s it for this week! Have you been wave watching lately? If not, what’s your excuse?

For #WaveWatchingWednesday: A collection of pictures that I took (and shared on my wave watching Insta @fascinocean_kiel over the last week. For some reason with a lot more commentary on here than on Insta itself, don’t know why. Maybe because I am writing this while it’s still dark outside and I am waiting for it to get light so I can go do some wave watching? ;-)

Nothing makes me instantly as happy as looking at water. Especially blue water, but any water will do. This picture below? That’s what happiness looks like for me. No matter what else is going on in my life, this view instantly makes me feel calm and content. And happy. What is it for you that has a similar effect on your emotions?

And I discovered a new perspective that I am a little obsessed with right now. Right where I live, there is a big art piece out of metal that looks a little ship-wreck-y and very nautical (it’s called “Hafen 77” by artist Felix Fehlmann). It has circular holes in it, reminiscent of portholes, but it never occurred to me before to use them to frame pictures in. This is my fist attempt at it — what do you think?

Now that I have discovered that porthole view, I wanted to go back the next morning to take a picture with different lighting. Unfortunately I was 2 minutes late to catch the Sweden ferry through the porthole! I hadn’t thought about how that would make a great picture until I saw her and it was already too late. But luckily there are more ships going in and out Kiel port, so there will be another chance!

To keep my Instagram feed looking nice I couldn’t post the next porthole pic right after the first one, but luckily there was pretty cool wave watching that morning, too!

This is a picture of several ducks’ wakes: see how they are forming 2D Mach cones with the ducks at the tip? Taking pictures of waves is always best around sunrise and sunset, because then the contrast between a light sky and dark land helps show the wave structures as differently sloped parts of the waves reflect different parts of the high contrast surroundings.

Here is the mystery spot again (well, mystery for Instagram, I already wrote above that this is the “Hafen 77” art by Felix Fehlmann, so you already knew).

But this time also “zoomed out” so people can figure out where this is!

And then I had a brilliant day trip with Sara!

Sylt, an island on the german North Sea coast, is amazing for wave watching. But amazing waves come at a great cost: the nice sand beaches are threatened by coastal erosion and have to be protected and maintained with huge efforts.
On our mini-excursion, we saw many different measures for coastal protection, like tetrapods (those gigantic four-legged concrete structures) and different kinds of wave breakers.
I took 625 pictures (ok, mainly of waves, but also a lot of the ongoing coastal protection construction works!) that I won’t manage to sort through tonight, so this is your chance: which coastal protection structures should I write about first? (All the following pictures belong to this blog post until the next text interrupts the flow ;-))

The next post wasn’t a wave watching post, for #SciCommSunday I wrote about why I post selfies on my social media (and this picture is clearly not a selfie, it was taken by my colleague Sebi Berens (www.sebiberensphoto.com / @sebiberensphoto)). But I like it a lot and was excited to post it on my Instagram using the excuse of #scientistswhoselfie ;-)

It’s really difficult for me not to watch the spectacle of the Oslo ferry making a U-turn in the narrow Kiel fjord before backing up into its berth. So difficult, that I took my conference call to the roof terrace and my colleague asked if I was swimming in the sea because apparently that’s what it sounded like on the other end. So ferry-watching was unfortunately cut short.

But watching the ferry wasn’t my main reason for visiting Geomar, see below what we were up to: Torge and I presented a seminar on “It’s always a great idea to play! Teaching ocean and atmosphere dynamics with rotating tanks” (or similar, can’t remember exactly ;-)) We gave a short presentation and then invited everybody “to play”. We had four rotating tables set up, each prepared for a different experiment. And people seemed to enjoy doing hands-on experiments a lot. So hopefully there is a lot more playing with a lot more players in our future! :-)

And then a little more about that amazing day trip to Sylt:

Why is there so much foam on the beach? Two factors are playing together here: Breaking waves trapping air under water that tries to get back up and out, and dissolved organic matter lowering the water‘s surface tension. Both have to be present at the same time: if the water was calm and no waves were breaking, there wouldn’t be a way to get air into the bubbles of the foam because no air would get underneath the water. And if the surface tension wasn’t lowered, the bubbles wouldn’t be able to exist, they would just collaps into drops of water.
Pretty counterintuitive that one has to lower surface tension to make bubbles that are stable, isn’t it?

(Next four pics show different foam situations on the beach)