Jonathan Aurnou
University of California Los Angeles
Seminar Information
Engineering Building Unit 2 (EBU2)
Room 479
Seminar Recording Available: Please contact seminar coordinator, Jake Blair at (j1blair@ucsd.edu)
Rotating tanks are a powerful teaching tool from the elementary through graduate school levels. They are ideal for demonstrating the basic fluid dynamics that underlie weather, climate, ocean circulation, and planetary and stellar interior fluid motions. Over the past few years, we have developed a series of do-it-yourself (DIY) hardware kits for building and carrying out desktop rotating tank experiments. In this talk, I will go over basic concepts and then carry out a set of desktop experiments as part of the seminar (which are always fraught and a bit of an adventure). With the interesting continental scale weather we are currently experiencing, winter-time instabilities of the polar jet stream will be the main problem we hone in on.
Prof. Jon Aurnou studies planetary fluid dynamics with interests ranging from planetary magnetic field generation to the formation of deep atmospheric jets on the gas giants. In doing so, his group at UCLA has developed water, oil and liquid metal-based experimental models of thermal convection, rotating convection and rotating magnetoconvection. As part of his broader outreach efforts, he has spearheaded the DIYnamics project (https://diynamics.github.io/) that will be the focus of his MAE talk.