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Big whorls have little whorls That feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. -- Lewis F. Richardson
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Big whorls have little whorls That feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. -- Lewis F. Richardson
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The poem summarises Richardson's 1920 paper :
'The supply of energy from and to Atmospheric Eddies'
The poem is a nice a summation of the fractal nature of turbulence .
Richardson, Lewis Fry
b. Oct. 11, 1881, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, Eng.
d. Sept. 30, 1953, Kilmun, Argyll, Scot.
Richardson was a British physicist and psychologist who was the first to apply mathematical techniques to predict the weather accurately. Richardson made major contributions to methods of solving certain types of problems in physics, and from 1913 to 1922 he applied his ideas to meteorology. His work, published in Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), was not entirely successful at first. The main drawback to his mathematical technique for systematically forecasting the weather was the time necessary to produce such a forecast. It generally took him three months to predict the weather for the next 24 hours. With the advent of electronic computers after World War II, his method of weather prediction, somewhat altered and improved, became practical. The Richardson number, a fundamental quantity involving the gradients (change over a distance) of temperature and wind velocity, is named after him.
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