Supplementary material for the thesis of Scott Veirs

This web page presents supplementary material for the PhD thesis of Scott Veirs. It contains hypertext links to animations (primarily in the .fli format) and to software that may help readers view the animations. The first section presents numerical model of diffuse plumes, courtesy Bill Lavelle (NOAA/PMEL); the second and third showcase animations of the advection and diffusion of heat from a steadily venting hydrothermal source in rectified and rotary oscillatory flow, respectively.

Puff model animations

Each animation listed below depicts a plan view of the Main Endeavour field (MEF). The MEF perimeter is delineated with a dashed black rectangle. Centered in the field is a single source emitting a constant flux of tracer (a 300 or 600MW "puff" of heat) into the overlying flow every half hour.

A single frame of a puff model animation is shown at right. In every animation, the main panel in each frame shows the evolution of the tracer distribution that results from advection and diffusion. The top panel shows the instantaneous net flux through the field perimeter. A black current vector in the right hand panel represents the half hourly velocity that forces the entire model domain during each time step. (The blue vector is a 5cm/s reference vector pointing due north.) The colorbar on the lower right indicates the tracer intensity, a temperature anomaly in degrees C.

Case 1: Observed rotary oscillatory flow

These animations show the output of the model forced by flow observed at one of the 3 uppermost current meters on the southern Flow Mow mooring, deployed about 1.1km south of the Main Endeavour vent field in summer, 2000. The forcing is provided first by the uppermost meter (FM_S250, 1942m depth), then by FM_S200 (1992m), and finally by FM_S150. The input flux is 600MW.

  1. FM_S250 long animation (27Mb) | FM_S250 short animation (5.5Mb)
  2. FM_S200 animation (21Mb)
  3. FM_S150 animation (78Mb)

Case 2: Idealized and rectified oscillatory flow with a range of mean flow added

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 about 1.1 km north and south of the MEF during the Flow Mow experiment. In all cases the input heat flux is 300MW.

Model forced with idealized oscillation and range of mean flows

The following 6 animations show the puff model forced by an ideal oscillation added to a mean flow of 0-5 cm/s. The final figure in the Veirs et al submission was derived from these model runs. 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.

Model forced with flow observed north and south of the MEF

Bill Lavelle's 3-D simulations of diffuse plumes

Follow the link (above) to visualize how plumes may rise from "diffuse" (low buoyancy flux) 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.

How to view the animations!

Note: these links lead to full-length animations in the FLIC (.fli) and Quicktime (.mov) formats. For those with slow connections, much shorter examples are availble for some cases -- specifically the last 2 days of the simulation -- are presented as animated gifs (.gif).

Warning: the uncompressed files are big! For the rectified flow case, the .mov files are 4.7-7.7 Mb, while the .fli flies are 3.8-11.4 Mb). To view the full-length animations via a slow connection you may want to download a compressed version of a particular file (.gz extension, 0.6-1.7 Mb).

A recent version of the Quicktime plugin or player should play either the .mov or .fli file formats, which should allow viewing via any platform and browser. Windows users may alternatively use the external FLIC animation viewer available for free from AutoDesk: aaplay.zip (100kb zip file; unzip to get an .exe executable). Similarly, the external application xanim works well on Linux/Unix operating systems.