Yesterday we had four rotating in operation simultaneously, running three different experiments. It’s pretty awesome to be able to bridge spin-up times by just observing what the teams on the neighboring tables are up to, also it’s nice to get a variety of experiments all happening at the same time. Very entertaining and educational indeed!
The experiment that everybody is gathering around in the picture above is our favourite experiment: a slowly rotating tank with cooling in the middle that shows a nice 2D circulation instead of an overturning as we would expect in a non-rotating system.
![](http://www.oceanblogs.org/teachingoceanscience/wp-content/uploads/sites/67/2020/01/Screen-Shot-2020-01-16-at-15.06.40.jpeg)
A second group was doing an Ekman spiral experiment similar to this one.
![](http://www.oceanblogs.org/teachingoceanscience/wp-content/uploads/sites/67/2020/01/Screen-Shot-2020-01-16-at-15.06.27.jpeg)
If you are interested in observing the bottom boundary layer of a tank, it might look a bit weird to people who don’t know what you are up to…
![](http://www.oceanblogs.org/teachingoceanscience/wp-content/uploads/sites/67/2020/01/Screen-Shot-2020-01-16-at-15.06.53.jpeg)
And the other two experiments were the planetary Rossby wave experiments that I’ve written about so much before that it doesn’t really matter that I didn’t take any pictures this time round — you can find plenty over on my blog.