Soap bubbles for predicting cyclone intensity?
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 08:30
in Earth & Climate
Could soap bubbles be used to predict the strength of hurricanes and typhoons? However unexpected it may sound, this question prompted physicists at the Laboratoire Ondes et Matière d'Aquitaine (CNRS, France) to perform a highly novel experiment: They used soap bubbles to model atmospheric flow. A detailed study of the rotation rates of the bubble vortices enabled the scientists to obtain a relationship that accurately describes the evolution of their intensity, and propose a simple model to predict that of tropical cyclones. The work, carried out in collaboration with researchers from the Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux and a team from Université de la Réunion, has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports.