Vortex Shedding in Air | Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations

GOES-17 (GOES West) captured a von Kármán vortex street off Guadalupe Island (off the west coast of Mexico’s Baja California) on April 21, 2020. Named after Theodore von Kármán, a physicist who was the first to describe their formation in detail, they tend to occur anywhere that a streaming fluid—or in this case, atmospheric flow—is disturbed by an object and undergoes oscillation. Here, winds blowing across the ocean are diverted around the islands, flowing around them and producing clouds in a

The Beauty of Vortex Streets