Flow measurements of turbulent rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection in the geostrophic regime

The study of turbulent rotating convection is of paramount importance for the understanding of many features of geophysical and astrophysical flows. Our experimental setup TROCONVEX, through its huge dimensions (up to 4 m tall), allows the investigation of parameters closer than ever before to the ones of geo- and astrophysical flows. In this talk we present flow measurements from this unique experimental setup using stereoscopic particle image velocimetry. We can compute flow statistics and characteristic length scales from these measurements. For high buoyancy forcing, we find a remarkable quadrupolar organization of the flow instead of the large-scale vortex observed in horizontally periodic simulations. We describe the dynamics of this quadrupolar vortex and its interactions with the wall mode near the sidewall.