We present a linear equation for the Walker circulation streamfunction and find its analytic solutions given specified convective heating. In a linear Boussinesq fluid with Rayleigh damping and Newtonian cooling, the stream-function obeys a Poisson’s equation, forced by gradients in the meridionally averaged diabatic heating and Coriolis force. For an idealized convective heating distribution, analytic solutions for the streamfunction can be found through an analogy with electrostatics. We use these solutions to study the response of the Walker circulation strength (mass transport) to changes in the vertical and zonal scales of convective heating. Robust responses are obtained that depend on how the total convective heating of the atmosphere responds to changing scale. If the total heating remains unchanged, increasing the zonal or the vertical scale always leads to a weaker circulation. Conversely, if the total heating grows in proportion to the spatial scale, the circulation becomes stronger with increasing scale. These conclusions are shown to be consistent with a three-dimensional numerical model. Moreover, they are useful in describing the observed seasonal and interannual (ENSO) variability of the Indo-PacificWalker circulation. On both timescales, the overturning becomes weaker with increasing zonal scale of the convective region, reminiscent of our solutions where we do not vary the total convective heating. Reanalysis data also indicate that the zonal circulation is quite strongly damped, thus yielding a result that the circulation strength is directly proportional to the warm-pool spatial-mean precipitation.
Particularly challenging classes of heterogeneous surfaces are ones where strong secondary circulations are generated, potentially dominating the flow dynamics. In this study, we focus on land‐sea breeze circulations (LSBs) resulting from surface thermal contrasts, in the presence of increasing synoptic pressure forcing. The relative importance and orientation of the thermal and synoptic forcings are measured through two dimensionless parameters: a heterogeneity Richardson number (measures the relative strength of geostrophic wind and convection induced by buoyancy), and the angle α between the shore and geostrophic wind. Large eddy simulations reveal the emergence of various regimes where the dynamics are asymmetric with respect to α. Along‐shore cases result in deep LSBs similar to the scenario with no synoptic background, irrespective of the geostrophic wind strength. Across‐shore simulations exhibit a circulation cell that decreases in height with increasing synoptic forcing. However, at the highest synoptic winds simulated, the circulation cell is advected away with sea‐to‐land winds, while a shallow circulation persists for land‐to‐sea cases. Scaling analysis that relates the internal parameters Qshore (net shore volumetric flux) and qshore (net shore advected kinematic heat flux) to the external input parameters results in a succinct model of the shore fluxes that also helps explain the physical implications of the identified LSBs. Finally, the vertical profiles of the shore‐normal velocity and shore‐advected heat flux are used, with the aid of k‐means clustering, to independently classify the LSBs into four regimes (canonical, sea‐driven, land‐driven, and advected), corroborating our visual categorization.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
<pre>We use the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) state-of-the-art AM4.1 atmospheric model to assess the impact of clouds on the change in tropical circulation. Slab-ocean experiments where cloud microphysical properties are locked to either the pre-industrial or 4xCO<sub>2</sub> conditions allow us to cleanly separate the circulation changes into a part caused by the cloud radiative effects (CREs), and to a part caused by the CO<sub>2</sub> changes. The CO<sub>2</sub>-induced SST changes are shown to dominate the response in the boundary layer, but are rivaled by the impacts of CREs in the mid to upper troposphere. The reduction in the east-to-west sea level pressure difference over the Pacific is solely caused by the increasing CO<sub>2</sub> and SST, but they only account for about half of the change in the mid-tropospheric Walker circulation. The weakening of the free-tropospheric circulation is shown to be mostly caused by the near-equal contributions the CO<sub>2</sub> and CREs make to the changes in dry-static and gross moist stability. Also, concerning the <span>meridional</span> circulation, we show that the response in the strength of the southern branch of the Hadley cell is largely due to CREs, while they have a much smaller impact in the north.</pre>
Using the thermospheric mass density measurements from the European Space Agency's Gravity field and steady state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite, we develop a new empirical geomagnetic disturbance time correction based on integrating the auroral electrojet (AE) index. For this, a US Naval Research Laboratory Mass Spectrometer and Incoherent Scatter Radar (NRLMSISE‐00) model with no geomagnetic parametrization is subtracted from the GOCE densities, and the regressions between the time‐integrated AE index and density residuals are computed as a function of latitude, solar time, and day of year. When we add this correction to the quiet time reference NRLMSISE‐00 model, it increases the model's disturbance time correlation with the 270 km normalized GOCE densities from 0.71 to 0.86. We assess the effect of integrating thermospheric density proxies with respect to time using both geomagnetic and solar indices and discover that the integration of AE, ap, and the epsilon parameter significantly increase their correlation with the orbit‐averaged GOCE densities. We compare the predictions of our empirical correction with the NRLMSISE‐00 and Jacchia‐Bowman (JB2008) models, and significant deviations from the measurements are discovered. The NRLMSISE‐00 is confirmed to generally underestimate the density enhancement, and the latitudinal shape of the predicted response shows too low enhancements at middle latitudes. Even though these are not issues for the JB2008 model, it performs weaker than the NRLMSISE‐00 at reproducing the orbit‐averaged densities. This unexpected result is attributed to the weakness of the ap parametrization, which is used in the model during smaller disturbances.
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