This paper presents an extensive survey of the most commonly used tools for diagnosing unbalanced flow in the atmosphere, namely the Lagrangian Rossby number, Psi vector, divergence equation, nonlinear balance equatio...This paper presents an extensive survey of the most commonly used tools for diagnosing unbalanced flow in the atmosphere, namely the Lagrangian Rossby number, Psi vector, divergence equation, nonlinear balance equation, generalized omega-equation, and departure from fields obtained by potential vorticity (PV) inversion. The basic thoery, assumptions as well as implementation and limitations for each of the tools are all discussed. These tools are applied to high—resolution mesoscale model data to assess the role of unbalanced dynamics in the generation of a mesoscale gravity wave event over the East Coast of the United States. Comparison of these tools in this case study shows that these various methods agree to a large extent with each other though they differ in details. Key words Unbalanced flow - Geostrophic adjustment - Gravity waves - Nonlinear balance equation - Potential vorticity inversion - Omega equations - Rossby number This research was conducted under support from NSF grant ATM-9700626 of the United States. The numerical computations described herein were performed on the Cray T90 at the North Carolina Supercomputing Center and the Cray supercomputer at the NCAR Scientific Computing Division, which also provided the initialization fields for the MM5. Thanks are extended to Mark Stoelinga at University of Washington for the RIP post-processing package.展开更多
文摘This paper presents an extensive survey of the most commonly used tools for diagnosing unbalanced flow in the atmosphere, namely the Lagrangian Rossby number, Psi vector, divergence equation, nonlinear balance equation, generalized omega-equation, and departure from fields obtained by potential vorticity (PV) inversion. The basic thoery, assumptions as well as implementation and limitations for each of the tools are all discussed. These tools are applied to high—resolution mesoscale model data to assess the role of unbalanced dynamics in the generation of a mesoscale gravity wave event over the East Coast of the United States. Comparison of these tools in this case study shows that these various methods agree to a large extent with each other though they differ in details. Key words Unbalanced flow - Geostrophic adjustment - Gravity waves - Nonlinear balance equation - Potential vorticity inversion - Omega equations - Rossby number This research was conducted under support from NSF grant ATM-9700626 of the United States. The numerical computations described herein were performed on the Cray T90 at the North Carolina Supercomputing Center and the Cray supercomputer at the NCAR Scientific Computing Division, which also provided the initialization fields for the MM5. Thanks are extended to Mark Stoelinga at University of Washington for the RIP post-processing package.
