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It is a form of fluid instability found in thermally stratified atmospheres in which a colder fluid overlies a warmer one. When an air mass is unstable, the element of the air mass that is displaced upwards is accelerated by the pressure differential between the displaced air and the ambient air at the (higher) altitude to which it was displaced.
A KH instability rendered visible by clouds, known as fluctus, [2] over Mount Duval in Australia A KH instability on the planet Saturn, formed at the interaction of two bands of the planet's atmosphere Kelvin-Helmholtz billows 500m deep in the Atlantic Ocean Animation of the KH instability, using a second order 2D finite volume scheme
As the instability grows, the center of mass of the fluid is lowered. In growing waves in the atmosphere, cold air moving downwards and equatorwards displaces the warmer air moving polewards and upwards. [citation needed] Baroclinic instability can be investigated in the laboratory using a rotating, fluid filled annulus. The annulus is heated ...
The lower atmosphere is therefore heated from below (UV absorption in the ozone layer heats that layer from within). Outdoor air is thus usually unstably stratified and convecting, giving us wind. Temperature inversions are a weather event which happens whenever an area of the lower atmosphere becomes stably-stratified and thus stops moving. [2 ...
Fluid instabilities occur in liquids, gases and plasmas, and are often characterized by the shape that form; they are studied in fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics. Fluid instabilities include: Ballooning instability (some analogy to the Rayleigh–Taylor instability); found in the magnetosphere; Atmospheric instability
In fluid dynamics, hydrodynamic stability is the field which analyses the stability and the onset of instability of fluid flows. The study of hydrodynamic stability aims to find out if a given flow is stable or unstable, and if so, how these instabilities will cause the development of turbulence . [ 1 ]
A baroclinic instability is a fluid dynamical instability of fundamental importance in the atmosphere and ocean. It can lead to the formation of transient mesoscale eddies, with a horizontal scale of 10-100 km. [1] [2] In contrast, flows on the largest scale in the ocean are described as ocean currents, the largest scale eddies are mostly created by shearing of two ocean currents and static ...
which is used frequently when considering atmospheric or oceanic flows [citation needed]. If the Richardson number is much less than unity, buoyancy is unimportant in the flow. If it is much greater than unity, buoyancy is dominant (in the sense that there is insufficient kinetic energy to homogenize the fluids).