The medium scale planetary wave regime, consisting largely of zonal wavenumbers 5-7, frequently dominate the summer Southern Hemisphere tropospheric circulation. We perform a diagnostic study of this circulation as simulated by the Canadian Climate Centre (CCC) general circulation model (GCM). The analysis of Hovmoller diagrams, space-time and zonal wavenumber spectra shows that the CCC GCM is able to simulate the observed medium scale wave regime. / The zonally averaged meridional eddy heat and momentum transports and the associated baroclinic and barotropic energy conversions are also examined. The distributions of the transports on the vertical plane agree well with observations. When compared to the observed summer 1979 distributions, some quantitative differences remain: the vertical structure of the heat transport is too baroclinic, while the momentum transport tends to be too weak. The baroclinic and barotropic conversions all show a medium scale wave signal. The time evolution of the Richardson number of the mean flow suggests that the medium scale wave is due to a finite amplitude baroclinic instability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.60493 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Su, Lin, 1966- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Meteorology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001257086, proquestno: AAIMM72051, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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