![]() My friend Leela (and it was so nice to have her visit!!!) and I observed this: And it did! So here is what I think I understand (and please feel free to jump in and comment if you have a better explanation).įirst, let’s recap what we are talking about. What’s your estimate?Īttempt at mechanistic understanding of Langmuir circulation.Īfter complaining about how I didn’t have mechanistic understanding of Langmuir circulation recently, and how I was too lazy to do a real literature search on it, my friend Kristin sent me a paper that might shed light on the issue. So, what do you think, how long will it take for that little styrofoam piece to travel 2 meter’s distance? Of course that depends on the kind of wave field, but give it a rough guess. But we have all heard over and over again that the effect can be neglected, and whenever we see a bird bobbing up and down in the waves but also moving horizontally, we quickly rationalize that it must be swimming autonomously, or that there is a current superimposed on the wave field. It is basically the effect of orbital movements not being closed circles, but rather spirally things. Now, we all know that Stokes drift is one of those ugly non-linear higher-order things that we ignore as much as possible. The piece of styrofoam has the advantage over the other swimming thingy that it hardly sinks into the water, and therefore constitutes an almost passive tracer of the waves’ movements. ![]() “Experiment” sounds too sophisticated for what actually happened: We dropped a piece of styrofoam in the waves and took the time it took that styrofoam piece to travel two meters. ![]() You can already see in that post’s movie that there is some swimming thing moving down the tank in the direction of wave propagation, but of course we had to quantify. When a higher-order effect suddenly becomes important.ĭuring our excursion to Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA), one of the experiments we ran was on Stokes drift.
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