Why the Rhine's length is crucially important to every living organism on Earth

Ryan Woodard
PHYS 645
Professor David Newman

The following is a superficial, yet incomplete, derivation of the Rhine's length, a scale in geophysical fluid dynamics that has implications in turbulent eddy growth and zonal flow. Some even believe that it could help explain the zonal bands on Jupiter:

Click on this picture to see the big version.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-jupiter.html

Your guided tour starts here, though you are welcome to peruse the following slides at random.

The entire presentation is available for download in Postscript, PDF or Latex format. This entire web site can be downloaded in .tar.gz format (675 Kb).

The presentation was originally made as a Postscript file using the Seminar package in Latex. That was converted to PDF (with ps2pdf) for the big oral presentation. Each slide was individually converted to a PNG file using the GIMP program. This is not the best format for web display, however it was the best solution to keep the equations and not take a lot of time.

Bibliography

Cushman-Roisin, Benoit, 1994. Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics.
Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Lesieur, Marcel, 1997. Turbulence in Fluids. Kluwer Academic Publishers,
The Netherlands. Pedlosky, Joseph, 1987. Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. Springer-Verlag
New York Inc., New York, New York. Rhines, P. B., 1975, "Waves and turbulence on a beta-plane", J. Fluid Mech., 69,
417-443.

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