STUDIES OF INERTIAL MOTION AND ASSOCIATED WAVES IN LAKE MICHIGAN.
Abstract
The report summarizes, mainly in a series of diagrams, the results of an investigation of the temperature distribution in a region of Lake Michigan, roughly bounded by Lat. 43 degrees 00' and 43 degrees 30' N, during the period of summer stratification in 1963. Measurements were made with bathythermographs from a railroad ferry vessel and from a research vessel, which was also used, at a mid-lake anchor station, as a platform to measure the vertical distribution of current speed and direction. The measurement program was designed to test the writer's predictions (Mortimer, 1963) that a dominant component of the internal wave pattern, in Lake Michigan in summer and in regions remote from shores, could be described in terms of Poincare waves with characteristic periods close to but always less than the local inertial period (17.5 hr) and with associated currents exhibiting clockwise rotation of the same periodicity and following an elliptical track. The report is prefaced by an illustrated account of internal wave (long wavelengths) and current patterns, associated with Kelvin and Poincare waves, in a rotating, two-layered, rectangular basin of uniform depth and of Great Lakes dimensions. Events observed in Lake Michigan are interpreted in terms of this model. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 1967
- Accession Number
- AD0663467
Entities
People
- Clifford H. Mortimer
Organizations
- University of Wisconsin–Madison