Wall modes are a characteristic feature of rotating convection and are observed in both experiments and direct numerical simulations. In this talk I will describe basic properties of these modes and their relation to the observed boundary zonal flows. These flows contaminate heat flux measurements in laboratory studies of geostrophic turbulence and are robust with respect to perturbations of the domain geometry and/or the presence of bulk turbulence. Despite this robustness wall modes can be suppressed by an appropriate intervention that can be implemented in laboratory experiments thereby offering a way to study geostrophic turbulence in the laboratory.
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