Formation and Development of Diabatic Rossby Vortices in a 10-Year Climatology

A diabatic Rossby vortex (DRV) is a short-scale, diabatically dominated, moist baroclinic disturbance that forms and grows in the absence of discernible upper tropospheric forcing. The overarching goal of this work is to expand on the limited amount of DRV research by examining the general characteristics of real-world DRVs that have been identified in an automated 10-year DRV climatology. The identified 314 DRVs form preferentially over warm ocean currents. All DRVs track to the east northeast. While more DRVs form during the warm season, a larger fraction of storms that explosively deepen occur during the cold season. Composite analyses bear strong resemblance to DRV structural plots in the published literature, confirming that moisture, baroclinicity and the diabatic generation of eddy available potential energy are essential to DRV formation and development. Upon inspection of the interaction between DRVs and the dynamic tropopause (DT), nine (30%) of the 31 explosively deepened DRVs are subjectively determined (based on how the DRVs interacted with DT to bomb) to be of type A development (as defined by Petterssen and Smebye [1971], so-called bottom-up development). The remaining 22 (70%) are subjectively identified as type C development (mutual interaction of pre-existing upper and lower tropospheric disturbances, as defined by Deveson et al. [2002]).

Department dc:contributor.department

Meteorology (MR)

Grantor dc:publisher

Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Shih, Nengwei Tom

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Moore, Richard W.

Statement dc:rights

• This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10945/7415

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:calhoun.nps.edu:10945/7415