South County Rhode Island 9pm 11/11. Aurora is visible to the naked eye, but this is taken with 3s exposure.

Also read about this on Tom's blog! 🌊

mrtomsblog.com/instruments/

Happy #WorldOceanDay! 🌊🧪 Photo of Kelvin-Helmoltz instability: Nick Statom

double 🧪🧪

single 🧪

The "green gap"

The Surf Lab just had our belated holiday party, which was a well timed jolt of fun and curiosity. We built a glider, ate pizza, and watched "Wind".

🧪 See what some of us in the ocean state are thinking about! (Picture from the swell last weekend)

vorticity distribution for 2d flow on a non-rotating (left) and rotating sphere (right). curvature and rotation arrest the inverse cascade and leads to zonal jet patterns. but, the stat mech predictions are the same: the energy (eventually) ends up in the lowest available mode in both cases. 🌊🧪

Not the ocean, but this setup is still at SIO if you are going to do demos.

vorticity distribution of 2d flow on a non-rotating sphere 🧪🌊

The Harvest buoy was reading ~24 feet at 22 seconds today -- yikes! 🌊🧪

The curve assumed by a perfectly elastic rod subject to longitudinal thrust is known as an elastica. Maxwell showed it's also the curve followed by particles near a uniformly translating cylinder (here I show the periodic extension).

Here's something that hasn't been fully explained that Longuet-Higgins wrote about in the 70s and 80s. The barrel of a breaking wave takes an approximately trochoidal shape. 🌊

🌊 Halloween vibes at the Graduate School of Oceanography, URI 🌊

From Davis's (1991) Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics article "Lagrangian Ocean Studies"

The aurora in southern New England.

New paper in JFM on the transition to turbulence in wind-drift layers, led by Greg Wagner, with Luc Lenain and Fabrice Veron. The Craik-Leibovich eqtns are employed to model wave induced vertical fluxes of heat/horiz mom., and here we compare them w/ obs.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Journal of Fluid Mechanics is known for their thorough and lengthy review process, but the time between receiving and accepting this paper is the spookiest thing I've seen this halloween season. Or is it a typo?