![]() ![]() And they weren’t enough of an explanation for everyone just because you can solve an equation doesn’t mean you understand it. But Matsuno’s equations didn’t explain everything about the waves. The equatorial waves existed, just as predicted. Kiladis and a colleague later confirmed another of Matsuno’s predictions when they related the length of a Kelvin wave to the frequency of its wiggles - a characteristic known as a dispersion relation - and found that it matched Matsuno’s equations. It was “one of the few times that theory predated the discovery,” said George Kiladis, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Scientists confirmed Matsuno’s predictions in 1968, when they observed the massive equatorial Kelvin waves for the first time. According to Matsuno’s mathematics, the resulting equatorial waves should flow eastward, and they should be enormous - thousands of kilometers long. In the sea, instead of pushing up against a coastline, they would collide with water from the opposite hemisphere, which rotated in the opposite direction. With his calculations, Matsuno showed that Kelvin waves should also exist at the equator. That happened in 1966, when Taroh Matsuno, a meteorologist, was mathematically modeling the behavior of fluids - both air and water - near Earth’s equator. ![]() Now known as coastal Kelvin waves, these waves have since been observed all over the world, flowing clockwise around landmasses (with the coastline on the right side of the wave) in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.īut it would be almost a century before scientists discovered the much larger equatorial ripples and connected them to the coastal Kelvin waves. This phenomenon pushes the water in the English Channel up against the French shoreline, forcing waves to flow along its coast. As the planet spins, it generates a force, called the Coriolis force, that causes fluids in each hemisphere to swirl in different directions: clockwise in the north, counterclockwise in the south. ![]() Thomson realized that this observation could be explained by the Earth’s rotation. ![]() In 1879, he noticed that the tides in the English Channel were stronger along the French coastline than on the English side. The first is all about water, and it starts with William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin. who was not involved in the work, said the new result is a significant advance that will provide a “foundational understanding” of Earth’s fluid systems. Geoffrey Vallis, an applied mathematician at the University of Exeter in the U.K. “We’re actually living inside of a topological insulator.” “This is a direct confirmation of these topological ideas, gleaned from actual observations,” said Brad Marston, a physicist at Brown University and an author of the new paper. The work has already helped scientists to use the language of topology to describe other systems, and it could lead to new insights about waves and weather patterns on Earth. Now, in a new preprint, a team of scientists describes the direct measurement of twisting atmospheric waves - the exact kind of evidence needed to bolster the topological theory. No one had directly observationally verified it. If you imagine the planet as a giant topological insulator, they said, you can explain the origin of the equatorial Kelvin waves.īut even though the theory worked, it was still only theoretical. As it turns out, Earth’s rotation deflects the flow of fluids in a way that’s analogous to how magnetic fields twist the paths of electrons moving through quantum materials called topological insulators. They began by imagining our planet as a quantum system, and they ended up making an unlikely connection between meteorology and quantum physics. In 2017, a trio of physicists applied a different type of thinking to the problem. These scientists wanted a more intuitive, physical explanation for the waves’ existence they wanted to understand the phenomenon in terms of basic principles and to answer questions like: What’s so special about the equator that permits a Kelvin wave to circulate there? And “why the heck does it always travel east?” said Joseph Biello, an applied mathematician at the University of California, Davis. Geophysicists have leaned on a mathematical explanation for equatorial Kelvin waves since the 1960s, but for some, that explanation wasn’t entirely satisfying. And they fuel oscillating weather patterns such as El Niño, a periodic warming of ocean temperatures that returns every few years. In both the ocean and the atmosphere, these gargantuan waves, called Kelvin waves, always travel eastward. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos. While much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. ![]()
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