Introduction
By Sheila Xu and Costa Christopoulos
There are two "ingredients" needed for weather on Earth:
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The tank experiment of eddy circulation is similar to the set-up of Hadley circulation. We define eddy circulation "fast rotation." Thermometers were are placed a little differently than the set-up of Hadley circulation:
(Side-view of the tank and thermometers placement) (Christopoulos, 2014)
Another difference is that red and blue dye were are used to observe the motion of cold and warm water in the tank. Blue dye was is placed closer to the ice bucket while red dye was is placed closer to the edge of the tank ("equator"). A series of images below show an evolution of the eddy circulation:
The rotation rate was set to 10 rpm. The bucket of ice contained a mass of 1200 g. Note that the red currents transport energy to the center.
The results from the thermometers are shown in the graph below:
There are larger temperature fluctuations, much more than the graph of the Hadley circulation tank experiment. This can be explained by the currents of the cold and warm water mixing. We estimated the fluctuation in the graph to be of an amplitude of 1 Celsius. Then, we calculated the radial heat flux so we can see the flow of heat into ice:
The power required to melt the ice is the latent heat of the ice times the amount of ice, divided by the amount of time it took for the ice to melt. L = 333 KJ/kg, m = 1.2 kg, t = 27 min (1624 sec), which came out to 0.246 kJ/s (246 Watts).
However, we also want to see how much of heat was transported by the eddies:
The area of the cylindrical surface at radius of 10 cm was 0.1 m^2. The velocity was .005 m/s. Using those values, the heat flux came out to 0.277 kJ/s (277 Watts).
The values of the fluxes, 246 Watts and 277 Watts, are close to each other even though the values are different (as long they are in the same order of magnitude).
Atmosphere
Two Regimes of Heat Transport