What is it about?
Atmospheres are constantly evolving, and information about what is happening is carried by waves of all shapes and sizes, including: i) sound waves, ii) buoyancy waves, like the waves on a lake but inside the atmosphere, and most especially, iii) vorticity waves (Rossby waves), an example being the meandering of the jet stream. When the wind blows faster than a particular wave speed, it prevents the information carried by that wave from propagating upstream. This article analyzes 30 years of global data for Earth's troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere, looking for correlations between vorticity waves and winds.
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Why is it important?
A prevalent theoretical idea has been that mixing removes most or all of the correlations between vorticity waves and winds in atmospheres and oceans. This article tests this idea for Earth's atmosphere, and finds that it is wrong. The only significant mechanical mixing of vorticity is found to be in the middle mesosphere; there is also some thermal homogenization of vorticity found in summer polar regions. At every other place and time, vorticity waves and winds are strongly correlated. This represents a paradigm shift in geophysical fluid dynamics.
Perspectives
This is the first in a trilogy of empirical papers examining wave-wind interactions in planetary fluid systems, via vorticity-streamfunction correlations. The three papers cover the atmosphere of Earth, the atmosphere of Mars, and Earth's Southern Ocean.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ertel potential vorticity versus Bernoulli streamfunction in earth's extratropical atmosphere, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, April 2015, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1002/2014ms000420.
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