The 10 minute summary:
Forced plumes in rotating tanks

Oceanography 569A

Scott Veirs, March, 2001

Presentation outline:

Motivation: Do hydrothermal vents form baroclinic vortices or bent over plumes?

Scaling arguments

Plumes in rotating, homogeneous, quiescent fluid

Reproducing results of Helfrich and Battisti (1991): (Plumes in rotating, stratified, quiescent fluid)

Future work

1. Less turbulence at source!
2. Bigger tank and better visualization (measurement!)
3. Profiler to get N faster (and plume modifications of N)
4. Verify off-center source behaves as centered sources do
5. Cross flow!!

Bill Lavelle's numerical simulation of THE TANK EXPERIMENTS OF FERNANDO, CHEN, & AYOTTE AND BUSH & WOODS

If you have comments, questions, or suggestions, email me at scottv@ocean.washington.edu

This research was conducted within the
University of Washington Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory