Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A man standing next to large ocean waves at Porto Covo, Portugal Video of large waves from Hurricane Marie along the coast of Newport Beach, California. In fluid dynamics, a wind wave, or wind-generated water wave, is a surface wave that occurs on the free surface of bodies of water as a result of the wind blowing over the water's surface.
Most water in Earth's atmosphere and crust comes from saline seawater, while fresh water accounts for nearly 1% of the total. The vast bulk of the water on Earth is saline or salt water, with an average salinity of 35‰ (or 3.5%, roughly equivalent to 34 grams of salts in 1 kg of seawater), though this varies slightly according to the amount of runoff received from surrounding land.
The arrows are wind vectors and the grey shading indicates an equivalent potential temperature surface that highlights the surface inflow layer and eyewall region. Geophysical fluid dynamics , in its broadest meaning, is the application of fluid dynamics to naturally occurring flows, such as lava, oceans , and atmospheres , on Earth and other ...
From "wind fluctuations": Wind wave formation is started by a random distribution of normal pressure acting on the water from the wind. By this mechanism, proposed by O.M. Phillips in 1957, the water surface is initially at rest, and the generation of the wave is initiated by turbulent wind flows and then by fluctuations of the wind, normal ...
In oceanography, sea state is the general condition of the free surface on a large body of water—with respect to wind waves and swell—at a certain location and moment. A sea state is characterized by statistics, including the wave height, period, and spectrum. The sea state varies with time, as the wind and swell conditions change.
In fluid dynamics, the Coriolis–Stokes force is a forcing of the mean flow in a rotating fluid due to interaction of the Coriolis effect and wave-induced Stokes drift. This force acts on water independently of the wind stress. [1] This force is named after Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis and George Gabriel Stokes, two nineteenth-century scientists.
It was Harold Jeffreys [4] in 1925 who was the first to produce a plausible explanation for the phase shift between the water surface and the atmospheric pressure which can give rise to an energy flux between the air and the water. For the waves to grow, a higher pressure on the windward side of the wave, in comparison to the leeward side, is ...
The force pushing the water towards the low pressure region is called the pressure gradient force. In a geostrophic flow, instead of water moving from a region of high pressure (or high sea level) to a region of low pressure (or low sea level), it moves along the lines of equal pressure . That occurs because the Earth rotates.