Teaching
Two courses that are regularly offered are "Introductory Physical Oceanography (PO)" and "Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD)" (roughly every 1.5 years).
For the PO class, we do a number of lab sessions, including demos of Taylor Column, Ekman pumping, Thermal wind + baroclinic instability, etc. These demos largely follow the wonderful textbook by Marshall and Plumb (2007) and MIT's "Weather in the tank" project.
For GFD, the focus is on QG, Rossby wave, instabilities, and introductory wave-mean interactions. For this class, we do a number of numerical demos, including geostrophic adjustment, Rossby waves forced by an oscillatory source and topography, Eady problem, and zonal jet formation (as a result of momentum convergence into a stirred region). The materials follow the wonderful textbook by Geoff Vallis, and the experiments are coded using Dedalus (thanks to Dedalus developers for making the solver available!) . See animations below.
Gravitational adjustment
Geostrophic adjustment
Rossby waves from an oscillatory source (Haidvogel and Rhines, 1983)
Stochastically forced zonal jet
White-noise forcing is applied along a zonal strip (centered at y = 5000 km). North of this forcing zone, the constant phase line of Rossby wave is tilted in northwest-southeast direction, whereas the southern counterpart is oriented northeast-southwest. The shape of the constant phase line indicates that momentum flux is converged into the stirred region, driving a eastward jet (i.e. zonal mean flow in the left panel).
