Generator

The bath is ten thousand times too small

The bath is ten thousand times too small
The bath is ten thousand times too small. The Rossby number — the ratio of the inertial term to the Coriolis term in the momentum equation — for eight flows at 45 degrees, on a logarithmic axis. Above one, rotation is a correction; below one, it is the physics. A draining bath sits at 3.2e+3 and a mid-latitude depression at 1.9e-1. The Coriolis term is not absent from the bath: it is present, computable, and four orders of magnitude smaller than the terms that decide what happens. Saying so is not the same as saying it is zero.

The Rossby number — the ratio of the inertial term to the Coriolis term in the momentum equation — for eight flows at 45 degrees, on a logarithmic axis. Above one, rotation is a correction; below one, it is the physics. A draining bath sits at 3.2e+3 and a mid-latitude depression at 1.9e-1. The Coriolis term is not absent from the bath: it is present, computable, and four orders of magnitude smaller than the terms that decide what happens. Saying so is not the same as saying it is zero.

4 essays call rotating-frame. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about.

It is also the blast radius. Changing rotating-frame changes every figure listed here at once, and on this site it may change what they assert as well as what they show — which is what has to be rebuilt and looked at before the change is believed.

Where it is called

What each of these essays asks for instead of the defaults is on the regime index, which reads the parameters back out of the finished figures rather than out of the placements.

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