88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Monday, 21 January 2008
Structure on eastward-moving cloud clusters in 2007 January MJO
Exhibit Hall B (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
Tetsuo Nakazawa, MRI, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
MJO consists of eastward-moving super clusters, which also consists of westward-moving cloud clusters by Geostationary Meteorological Satellite (Nakazwa, 1988). Recently we can get various satellite data, such as hourly MTSAT images, microwave sensors. The paper reports a structure of eastward-moving cloud clusters, associated with a MJO in late 2006 and early 2007. The result shows that the cluster accompanies a northwest-southeast oriented low level convergence line. There are westerlies (>15 m/s) west of the line and easterlies (10 m/s) east of it. The phase speed of the clusters is 13 m/s with a bit faster speed, comparing with the normal MJO phase speed of 5-10 m/s, but the overall phase speed of combining with two clusters is less than 10 m/s.

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