84th AMS Annual Meeting

Sunday, 11 January 2004
On The Motion Of Solitary Synoptic Eddies
Room 608/609
Bharat Khushalani, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Substitution of continuous distribution of vorticity by a discrete distribution often leads to simplistic dynamical study of subtropical pressure systems. Beta-plane approximation to determine velocity field in the ocean and atmosphere leads to a planar model of global-scale atmospheric motions. However, for a physically meaningful model, spherical geometry needs to be considered to fully accomodate effects of curvature on the resulting motion. The motion of hydrodynamic point singularities on the plane can then only be closely approximated when radius of the sphere is very large. Equations for trajectories of N such point vortices moving on an S2 sphere form an effective model for concentrated eddies. Given such a background, numerical study of motion of solitary synoptic eddies is considered here in the presence of large number of eddies. For a short period of time where it is not neccessary to take dissipative effects into account, the resulting trajectory gives qualitative agreement with the observed eddy motions.

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