Giant Atmospheric Waves Filmed Over Iowa

NJChopperMan writes "For all those of you that thought waves only existed in the ocean, Photos and video of undular bore waves were caught in Iowa last week." The story also touches on the role of undular bores in severe weather, but it's definitely second fiddle to the video of the waves.

Comments

on a map

[Paktu]

Here's a pretty good example of what this looks like on a weather map

Air & Water are both fluids...

[Zymergy]

...and thus they will both have fluid dynamic behaviors when vibrating (waves) at the interface of another fluid.
Wave action happens at the disturbance interface (involving the propagation of and/or transfer of energy) between fluids of different densities.
The Air/Water fluid interface where one observes common "waves" are observed as water waves because the air is transparent (but it too has waves).
The difference here, is that we have two air masses of different temperatures and humidities (thus having differing densities) interfacing as fluids AND one of them happens to be an air mass that contains visible moisture in the form of clouds.
It is likely that this type of air/air fluid "wave action" happens frequently at the interface between differing atmospheric air masses (AKA fronts), but in this example the clouds made it easily visible.
Nice Image too: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/images/undularbore/redgreen_big.gif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave

Re:Surf's up

[Tastecicles]

They already ride the jetstream and save fuel/time on Transatlantic crossings. I forget which direction, but it's around half an hour saving on flight time. That's a /lot/ of fuel.