Jacob Wenegrat

@roguewave.bsky.social

1422 Followers 513 Following

Physical oceanographer, Associate Professor at University of Maryland College Park. Geophysical fluid dynamics, submesoscales, sailing, and… wenegrat.github.io

Picture of a bathythermography, used to measure temperature in the ocean until the 1960s.

Screen shot of text that says 'On one occasion he had to arm-wrestle the program manager from the Office of Naval Research for the last $100,000 of funding. Fortunately, he won.'

A postcard of the SMS Planet.

A plot showing the change in temperature as a function of depth over the 20th century in the Indian Ocean.

A photograph of a ship at anchor with a person standing in the foreground.

A plot from the cruise report of the Valdivia.

A few lines of a table reporting date (25, Dec 1874), lat/lon, and temperature measurements as a function of depth.

Photograph of the SMS Gazelle

Photo of the crew of the SMS Planet posed in port, many holding beers.

For the sake of brevity in reference to these two components it is very convenient to have separate names for them. Let us call the one due to rotation of the earth the geostrophic component, and the one due to the curvature of the path the cyclostrophic component.

I think 'geostrophic' is the more euphonious of the two and that it might have turned out 'catastrophic' to have adopted 'geostrepsic'.

Screenshot of the title of a manuscript 'Origin of the Word "Geostrophic" by E. Gold.