Double Diffusive Instablilty

The double diffusive consisted of filling a 1 meter square by 1 cm deep tank with salty water such that the salinity concentration decreases linearly toward the top of the tank. A destabilizing vertical thermal gradient was then imposed from the back of the tank.

I was ultimately unsuccessful at my primary goal which was to observe the onset of layers due to the instability of the above configuration to double diffusion (see my paper above). The primary instability was due to lateral thermal gradients and therefore set a size scale for the layers. The experiment was, however helpful to understand layer interaction. A more thorough discussion can be found in the 1996 Proceedings of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Summer School at WHOI.