A new laboratory experiment to study gravity waves emission in the atmosphere

What is it about?

A new configuration of the classical baroclinic annulus experiment, recently built at the BTU laboratory, is presented in this paper. We called this experiment the “atmospheric-like” differentially heated rotating annulus for its characteristic aspect ratio that makes it more similar to the Earth’s atmosphere. The first evidence of gravity waves emitted from the baroclinic jet is reported. The conditions for gravity wave emission and propagation in this particular experimental set-up are examined in detail with the support of comparable numerical simulations. It emerges that, due to the complex horizontal structure of the buoyancy frequency N, where the largest values occur along the baroclinic jet axis, the gravity waves in the experiment are observed to be trapped.

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