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 oriented vertically. The general flow is counter-clockwise, the same as the direction of rotation of the experiment. The four orange/red vortices rotate in the clockwise direction.
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.
The picture below is taken from the book "Topics in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics: Atmospheric Dynamics, Dynamo Theory, and Climate Dynamics," by M. Ghil and S. Childress, Springer-Verlag (1987). It shows the monthly mean map of 500 mb geopotential heights for January 1963, and was provided by K. C. Mo. The contour intervals are 20 m. The lines in this indicate flow direction, similar to stream function contours.
The two regions marked H in the diagram are anticyclones, where the air moves in a clockwise direction (located at 4 o'clock and 7 o'clock). These correspond to the two dark red anticyclones in the picture from the experiment (at about 4 o'clock and 10 o'clock). The general flow is counter-clockwise, which is the direction the planet rotates.
