Work done by Eric Weeks, Yudong Tian, Jeff Urbach, Michael Ghil, and Harry Swinney.
This is a streamfunction taken from experimental data showing what we are calling "blocked flow". The peaks of the mountains are at 6 o'clock and 12 o'clock.
The streamfunction is a way to represent a two-dimensional flow. Particles in the flow will follow the streamlines -- lines where the stream function is constant. Some of these lines are shown in the pictures below. Where the lines are close together, the flow is moving fast. These pictures are time-averaged streamfunctions so they show the general trends of the flow rather than the motions that a specific tracer particle would follow.
