Baroclinic
Sign in to saveAlso known as Baroclinity
thumb|right|300px|Density lines and isobar (meteorology)|isobars cross vertically in a baroclinic fluid. thumb|right|300px| Visualization of a (fictive) formation of isotherms (red-orange) and isobars (blue) in a baroclinic atmospheric layering. thumb|right|upright=1.2|A rotating tank experiment modelling baroclinic eddies in the atmosphere In fluid dynamics, the baroclinity (often called baroclinicity) of a stratified fluid is a measure of how misaligned the gradient of pressure is from the gradient of density in a fluid. In meteorology, a baroclinic flow is one in which the density depends o
~5 min read
Encyclopedic overview
4 sectionsContents
- Baroclinic instability
- Baroclinic vector
- References
- Bibliography
thumb|right|300px|Density lines and isobar (meteorology)|isobars cross vertically in a baroclinic fluid. thumb|right|300px| Visualization of a (fictive) formation of isotherms (red-orange) and isobars (blue) in a baroclinic atmospheric layering. thumb|right|upright=1.2|A rotating tank experiment modelling baroclinic eddies in the atmosphere In fluid dynamics, the baroclinity (often called baroclinicity) of a stratified fluid is a measure of how misaligned the gradient of pressure is from the gradient of density in a fluid. In meteorology, a baroclinic flow is one in which the density depends on both temperature and pressure (the fully general case). A simpler case, barotropic flow, allows for density dependence only on pressure, so that the curl of the pressure-gradient force vanishes.
Baroclinity is proportional to: \nabla p \times \nabla \rho
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Baroclinic” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.