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Arctic and Antarctic cells in the troposphere

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Abstract

The three-cell model, including the Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells in each of two hemispheres, has been accepted for a long time and the strongest Hadley cell has been used to study the climate change in recent years. However, two questions, why the upper level flow of Ferrel cell does not match observations and how many cells exist in the two polar regions, still exist. Using three different reanalysis datasets for the last 30 years, this paper showed that there might be an additional cell in each of two polar regions. The analyses of meridional-vertical section streamline (MSS), meridional-mass stream function (MSF), and climatic vertical velocity provide some evidences to support the existence of the new Arctic and Antarctic cells located in the troposphere. Thus, an eight-cell model in the global troposphere is proposed in this study. The maximum intensity of the Hadley cell in the boreal winter indicated by MSF in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) is stronger than that of the Ferrel cell for about 4.8 times, so the upper level northeasterly wind of Ferrel cell is too weak to be detected when compared with the stronger southwesterly wind of the Hadley cell.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, which significantly improved the paper. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41375073) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA05090407) and the Key Technologies R&D Program (201306032). Dr. J. Du of EMC/NCEP is appreciated for his help to improve the readability of the manuscript. Three Reanalysis datasets are derived respectively from the websites of http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html and http://www.ecmwf.int/research/era/do/get/index.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Weihong Qian, Kaijun Wu & Haoyuan Liang

  2. School of Geography and Planning, Guangxi Teachers Education University, Nanning, 530001, China

    Haoyuan Liang

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  1. Weihong Qian
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  2. Kaijun Wu
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  3. Haoyuan Liang
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Correspondence to Weihong Qian.

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Qian, W., Wu, K. & Liang, H. Arctic and Antarctic cells in the troposphere. Theor Appl Climatol 125, 1–12 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1485-z

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