Waves, turbulence and diffusion in Beta-Plumes: Rotating tank experiments at TurLab, Turin

This dataset provides horizontal flow fields (velocity, relative vorticity, divergence, and shear strain rate) from nine rotating turbulence experiments carried out at TurLab at the University of Turin between November 2016 and February 2017 by a team led by Oxford scientists in collaboration with others at the time from Università degli Studi di Torino, University of South Florida, Università del Piemonte Orientale and Sapienza Università di Roma. The experimental device was a rotating cylinder, 5 m in diameter filled with fresh water to a depth of 56 cm. The tank had a conical bottom, sloping upwards towards the centre from the outer edge over a radius of 2.25 m at an angle of 11.1◦. The flow was mechanically forced by a moving comb of vertical paddles partially immersed in the water, which moved backwards and forwards along a near-radial line over 100–150 s. The resulting flow was visualised using a laser sheet and microscopic particles, imaged using two cameras, and then processed into horizontal velocity fields and derived quantities using UVMAT/CIV (http://servforge.legi. grenoble-inp.fr/projects/soft-uvmat). The main quantity varied between the experiments included in this dataset is the rotation period of the tank. There were minor differences in the comb configuration at each rotation period. †