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
Tag: von Karman vortex street
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
Nighttime Streets
Clouds spiral behind the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria in this nighttime satellite imagery. Although it’s not entirely unusual to see these von Karman vortex street clouds in the wakes of Keep reading
Swirls of Color
These beautiful swirls show the wake downstream of a thin plate. Here water is flowing from left to right and dye introduced on the plate (upstream and unseen in the Keep reading
The Swimming of a Dead Fish
When I was a child, my father would take me trout fishing, and I spent hours marveling from the riverbank at the trouts’ ability to, seemingly effortlessly, hold their position Keep reading