About the photos
I found this
photo on the
Kentucky Geological Survey
website. The plume in the middle is actually mostly condensed water vapor.
The pollutant emissions from these stacks have been greatly reduced as a
result of "scrubbers", through which the flue gas passes prior to
being released from the smokestack. Click the photo for more details.
This is a
photograph of Kelvin-Helmholtz wave breaking, visible from its affects on a
cirrus cloud sheet. The wind is traveling from left to right at a higher
speed above the cloud sheet than below. This induces waves, which are
noticeable from the wavelike billows on the upper part of the cloud. The
waves are also traveling from left to right. The billows become more and
more smeared out from left to right as a result of turbulence induced by
wave breaking. This photo can be located at the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) Photo Library.
This is an infrared
satellite photograph of a storm system passing through the west coast of
the United States, taken from the
Monterey, CA
office of the National Weather Service on Jan. 18,
2006. The white areas denote the cloud tops and the colors are the
regions with the strongest imbedded precipitation. Note that while the
system is large the areas of precipitation are more localized. This is
typical of these types of weather systems, making precipitation forecasting more
difficult in many ways than that of tracking the storm system as a whole.
This is a picture of
turbulent dispersion of a salt tracer (white) in water (grey) from an
experiment conducted by
researchers at
Brandeis University. The direct effect of turbulence,
as seen here, is to stir the fluid, creating thin filaments of fluid,
some with tracer and others with clean water. Mixing takes place by molecular diffusion at the interface
between adjacent tracer-laced and clean filaments. The regions that have
experienced mixing, therefore, are those in the photo in which the color
is between white and grey.
