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12: Vorticity in the Ocean

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    Most of the fluid flows with which we are familiar, from bathtubs to swimming pools, are not rotating, or they are rotating so slowly that rotation is not important except maybe at the drain of a bathtub as water is let out. As a result, we do not have a good intuitive understanding of rotating flows. In the ocean, rotation and the conservation of vorticity strongly influence flow over distances exceeding a few tens of kilometers. The consequences of the rotation leads to results we have not seen before in our day-to-day dealings with fluids. For example, did you ask yourself why the curl of the wind stress leads to a mass transport in the north-south direction and not in the east-west direction? What is special about north-south motion? In this chapter, I will explore some of the consequences of rotation for flow in the ocean.


    This page titled 12: Vorticity in the Ocean is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Robert H. Stewart via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.