Climate dynamics

Abstract:

The stratospheric sudden warming in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) in September 2002 was unexpected for two reasons. First, planetary wave activity in the Southern Hemisphere is very weak, and midwinter warmings have never been observed, at least not since observations of the upper stratosphere became regularly available. Second, the warming occurred in a west phase of the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) in the lower stratosphere. This is unexpected because warmings are usually considered to be more likely in the east phase of the QBO, when a zero wind line is present in the winter subtropics and hence confines planetary wave propagation to higher latitudes closer to the polar vortex. At first, this evidence suggests that the sudden warming must therefore be simply a result of anomalously strong planetary wave forcing from the troposphere. However, recent model studies have suggested that the midwinter polar vortex may also be sensitive to the equatorial winds in the upper stratosphere, the region dominated by the semiannual oscillation. In this paper, the time series of equatorial zonal winds from two different data sources, the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA) and the Met Office assimilated dataset, are reviewed. Both suggest that the equatorial winds in the upper stratosphere above 10 hPa were anomalously easterly in 2002. Idealized model experiments are described in which the modeled equatorial winds were relaxed toward these observations for various years to examine whether the anomalous easterlies in 2002 could influence the timing of a warming event. It is found that the 2002 equatorial winds speed up the evolution of a warming event in the model. Therefore, this study suggests that the anomalous easterlies in the 1-10-hPa region may have been a contributory factor in the development of the observed SH warming. However, it is concluded that it is unlikely that the anomalous equatorial winds alone can explain the 2002 warming event. © 2005 American Meteorological Society.

Abstract:

Accurate representation of different kinds of wave motion is essential for numerical models of the atmosphere, but is sensitive to details of the discretization. In this paper, numerical dispersion relations are computed for different vertical discretizations of the compressible Euler equations and compared with the analytical dispersion relation. A height coordinate, an isentropic coordinate, and a terrain-following mass-based coordinate are considered, and, for each of these, different choices of prognostic variables and grid staggerings are considered. The discretizations are categorized according to whether their dispersion relations are optimal, are near optimal, have a single zero-frequency computational mode, or are problematic in other ways. Some general understanding of the factors that affect the numerical dispersion properties is obtained: heuristic arguments concerning the normal mode structures, and the amount of averaging and coarse differencing in the finite difference scheme, are shown to be useful guides to which configurations will be optimal; the number of degrees of freedom in the discretization is shown to be an accurate guide to the existence of computational modes; there is only minor sensitivity to whether the equations for thermodynamic variables are discretized in advective form or flux form; and an accurate representation of acoustic modes is found to be a prerequisite for accurate representation of inertia-gravity modes, which, in turn, is found to be a prerequisite for accurate representation of Rossby modes. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.