Thursday, 7 November 2002: 4:20 PM
Quantifying the tropopause mixing barrier in the Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model
Mixing barriers in the atmosphere play an important role in shaping the
large-scale dynamical circulation, and greatly affect the transport of
chemical species. While some success has been achieved in identifying the edge
of the tropical pipe and the wintertime polar vortex barrier, finding the
location of the tropopause mixing barrier has proven to be much more
elusive. In this study, various methods are applied to identify the tropopause
mixing barrier in the Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model, a three-dimensional
coupled chemistry GCM. A GCM is used partly to provide a dynamically
self-consistent data set, and partly because it is an important exercise in
itself to assess the extent to which such models represent the tropopause
mixing barrier. The methods studied include Nakamura's effective diffusivity,
age of air, and PDFs of chemical species. In addition to quantifying the
tropopause mixing barrier in the model, comparison of the different methods
sheds light on their commonalities and differences.
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