Rotating annulus experiment: Large-scale helical soliton in the atmosphere? art. no. 056621

A typhoon is a cyclone vortex with a warm low pressure center, formed over tropical oceanic waters. A large-scale rotating annulus experiment of fluid dynamics is carried out, under the conditions of dynamic similarity, geome tric similarity, and the similarity of boundary conditions. In the first st ep, with the help of infrared heaters, the basic flow field and helical str ucture of a single typhoon were successfully simulated; then two model typh oons were generated, and their interactions tested. It demonstrated that th ey did separate after colliding, with each other, and their respective basi c shapes were restored, which confirms the basic dynamic features of typhoo ns in nature as solitons. It was also shown that the formation of their hel ical structures is related to the adapting process of atmosphere to the rot ation of the earth and that their dynamic characteristics as solitons come from a result of an equilibrium between their dispersion and the nonlinear convergence of the anticyclones, with whose combined actions their structur e remains stable for a long period, which in turn means that they are indee d three-dimensional helical solitons.