Image courtesy CU/NCAR and the TOY Geophysical Turbulence Summer School

Every year, the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences conducts a 3-week-long Geophysical Turbulence Summer School, in which students learn how to model complex phenomena as part of a course on computational methods, scientific computing and visualization. In 2008, their Theme Of the Year, or TOY, was on gravity waves. And the above is what team of students — Jochem Floor, Neven-Stjepan Fuckar, and Dorota Jarecka — came up with, to illustrate the idea of a gravity wave.