G^3 Supplementary Material: Veirs et al Animations

This web page presents supplementary material for a manuscript submitted to G-cubed by Veirs, McDuff, and Stahr. It contains hypertext links to animations of a numerical model of diffuse plumes, courtesy Bill Lavelle (NOAA/PMEL), and to a series of animations of the advection and diffusion of heat from a hydrothermal vent.

  1. Bill Lavelle's 3-D simulations of diffuse plumes

    Follow the link to visualize how diffuse plumes may rise from sources that have salinities close to sea water concentrations. The model simulates the 3-dimensional evolution of plumes with slightly different source buoyancy flux rising into a steady cross flow and equilibrating in stratification that is typical of the MEF vicinity.

  2. Puff model animations

    Each animation in this section shows the plan view of the Main Endeavour Field, delineated with a dotted black line. Centered in the field is a single source emiting a constant amount of tracer (a "puff" of heat) into the overlying flow every half-hour. In the first set of animations the flow is an ideal oscillation combined with mean flows of increasing magnitude; in the latter, the flow forcing the model is the observed record from the summer of 2000, acquired during the Flow Mow experiment. In addition to the evolving distribution, there other panels shown in each animation. The top panel shows the evolution of net flux through the field perimeter. A black current vector on the right side represents the hourly or half-hourly data that forces the entire model domain during each time step. (The blue vector is a 5cm/s reference vector point due north.) The colorbar on the right indicates the tracer intensity as a temperature anomaly in degrees C.

    Model forced with idealized oscillation and range of mean flows

    The following 5 animations show the puff model forced by an ideal oscillation added to a mean flow. The ideal oscillation is one spring/neap cycle of the time series derived through harmonic analysis (courtesy Hal Mofjeld, NOAA/PMEL) of current meter data collected in 1995 about 200m NE of the MEF.

    Note that these links lead to animations in the .fli format. Warning: the uncompressed files are big (3.8-11.4Mb); on a slow connection you may want to download the compressed files individually (.gz extension, 0.6-1.7 Mb) or as a compressed tarball (.tar.gz, 6.2 Mb). The ".fli Java player" link will take you to a web page that will show the animation using the java applet, fliplay, which allows some interactive control. The ".fli file" link allows you to download the entire animation and view it with an external application (xanim works well on Linux/Unix OS).