Rhines

Rhines can refer to a surname or to a scientific concept named after a researcher with that name. As a surname, Rhines is of Germanic origin and appears in North America and Europe, among other regions. It is found in historical and genealogical records and is sometimes confused with Rhine, the name of a major European river, though Rhines and Rhine are distinct in usage.

The Rhines scale is a theoretical concept in geophysical fluid dynamics used to describe rotating, stratified fluids such as Earth's atmosphere and oceans. It identifies the length scale at which turbulent motions become influenced by planetary rotation and the latitudinal variation of the Coriolis parameter, known as the beta effect. The scale provides insight into the transition from isotropic turbulence to anisotropic, jet-like flow and helps explain the formation of large-scale zonal structures in planetary atmospheres and oceans. The Rhines scale is commonly expressed as L_R = sqrt(U/β), where U is a characteristic velocity and β is the meridional gradient of the Coriolis parameter.

In usage, Rhines thus appears primarily as a surname and as the name of a physical concept associated with turbulence and planetary rotation, rather than as a separate geographic or institutional term.