European High-Performance Infrastructures
in Turbulence

The thermally-driven baroclinic rotating annulus is a key system to investigate nonlinear dynamics and transition to turbulent flow in a rapidly rotating fluid. This project will investigate the onset of turbulent flow in the Cottbus Baroclinic Wave Tank. Starting with a regular and large-scale baroclinic wave flow, and incrementally increasing the forcing, the structure of the flow features emerging alongside the large-scale wave will be observed in both, the temperature field in the surface layer using the Infrared camera and the horizontal velocity field in the interior using particle image velocimetry (PIV). Analysing the spatiotemporal features and their spectra will be used to explore the processes leading to turbulence in this stably stratified, rapidly rotating fluid.