Abstract
The following questions are central in studies of the global circulation:
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Is the mean flow influenced by atmospheric waves like gravity waves or Rossby waves? And if so, how?
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Vice versa, how does the mean flow influence the waves?
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Notes
- 1.
It is not required here that the streamfunction is real-valued. As we will see below, real-valued fields are obtained from superposing WKB solutions with opposite wavenumbers and with complex-conjugate amplitudes.
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A corresponding generalization is possible.
- 3.
Here the asterisk does not indicate the complex conjugate.
- 4.
In the mesosphere higher up small-scale gravity waves play the dominant role. In the present formulation their influence can be captured via corresponding forcing \(\langle F\rangle \ne 0\) and heating \(\langle Q\rangle \ne 0\).
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Achatz, U. (2022). The Interaction Between Rossby Waves and the Mean Flow. In: Atmospheric Dynamics. Springer Spektrum, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63941-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63941-2_8
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