Traveling planetary-scale Rossby waves in the winter stratosphere: The role of tropospheric baroclinic instability
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Author(s)
Domeisen, Daniela I. V.
Plumb, R. Alan
Date Issued
October 2012
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
Citation
Domeisen, Daniela I. V., and R. Alan Plumb. “Traveling Planetary-Scale Rossby Waves in the Winter Stratosphere: The Role of Tropospheric Baroclinic Instability.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 39, no. 20 (October 28, 2012): n/a–n/a.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The Southern Hemisphere winter stratosphere exhibits prominent traveling planetary-scale Rossby waves, which generally are not able to induce Stratospheric Sudden Warmings. A series of runs of a simplified general circulation model is presented, aimed at better understanding the generation of these waves. While the generation of planetary-scale traveling waves through the interaction of synoptic-scale waves is observed in a control run, when the model is truncated to permit only waves with zonal wave number 1 or 2, the long waves are found to increase in strength, leading to a considerably more active stratosphere including Sudden Warmings comparable in strength to Northern Hemisphere winter. This finding suggests that the role of tropospheric synoptic eddies is two-fold: while generating a weak planetary-scale wave flux into the stratosphere, their main effect is to suppress baroclinic instability of planetary-scale waves by stabilizing the tropospheric mean state.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2012GL053684
