In late January, dust from the Sahara blew westward toward the Cabo Verde archipelago before turning northward toward Europe. During winter and spring, Saharan dust tends to stay at lower Keep reading
Tag: von Karman vortex street
Seeding Clouds
In the remote South Atlantic, north of the Antarctic Circle, sit the volcanic Zavodovski and Visokoi islands. Though only roughly 500 and 1000 meters tall, respectively, each island disrupts the Keep reading
Walking in the Wake of a Cylinder
A cylinder in a flow produces a series of alternating vortices known as a von Karman vortex street. Changing the flow speed and rotating the cylinder both allow researchers to Keep reading
Actinoform Clouds
Flower-shaped actinoform clouds, like those seen on the left side of this satellite image, were only discovered in the 1960s once satellite imagery allowed meteorologists to identify cloud structures that Keep reading
Tidal Vortices
Local topography in the Sea of Okhotsk funnels water to create some of the largest diurnal tides in the world — nearly 14 meters! The currents rushing past islands and Keep reading
Swirls in the Wake
Rocky islands make excellent atmospheric swirls, as seen here around Guadalupe Island. Winds blowing in from the ocean get forced up and around the island’s topography, resulting in vortices that Keep reading
“Kármán Vortex Street”
Although engineers often consider fluid mechanics through the lens of mathematics, that’s far from the only way to understand fluid physics. Today’s video is an alternative interpretation of a classic Keep reading
Strings of Swirls
Von Karman vortex streets are the rows of alternating vortices shed off isolated objects interrupting a flow. Here, the volcanic peaks of Cabo Verde disrupt an atmospheric flow accustomed to Keep reading
High Tide
Broad Sound, in eastern Australia, is home to some of the most extreme tidal swings in the world, with more than ten meters difference between high and low tides. The Keep reading
Curls Past the Canaries
When winds flow past a solitary peak, like an island in the ocean, they’re disrupted into a series of counter-rotating curls. That’s what we see here stretching to the southwest Keep reading