An experiment combining flow visualization and transient temperature measurement is carried out to investigate the characteristics of the mixed convective vortex flow resulting from a low speed air jet impinging onto a heated horizontal circular disk confined in a vertical adiabatic cylindrical chamber. Attention is focused on the conditions leading to the onset of the inertia and buoyancy driven vortex rolls and the effects of governing nondimensional groups on the steady and time dependent vortex flow. More specifically, experiments are conducted for the jet Reynolds number varied from 0 to 1082 and Rayleigh number from 0 to 18,790 for two different injection pipes. The results show that typically the steady vortex flow in the processing chamber consists of two inertia-driven and one buoyancy-driven circular vortex rolls. The secondary inertia-driven roll only appears at high jet Reynolds numbers. At low buoyancy-to-inertia ratio Gr/Re-j(2) the vortex rolls are steady and axisymmetric. But at certain high Gr/Re-j(2) the vortex flow becomes unstable and the vortex rolls are somewhat deformed. Besides, new vortex rolls can be induced by the additional thermal rising from the heated disk and the splitting of the primary inertia-driven roll. The temporal characteristics of the time periodic vortex flows are examined in detail. In the region dominated by the new rolls the flow oscillates significantly. Finally, empirical equations are proposed to correlate the oscillation frequency of the time periodic flow, and the size and location of the vortex rolls. Furthermore, the conditions for the onset of the buoyancy driven rolls are given. A flow regime map is provided to delineate the temporal state of the vortex flow. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.