Jonathan Aurnou University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) In this talk, I will step through a series movies of simple laboratory fluid dynamics experiments. In doing so, we will consider buoyancy driven flows with and without rotation. This will serve as a broad-based graduate level primer and allow for the introduction of many of the essential ideas of rapidly-rotating fluid dynamics, as are relevant to most geophysical applications. Then I will carry out a few experiments live, most likely demonstrating Ekman pumping and the formation of a Taylor column.