Storm Tracks in the Southern Hemisphere

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Abstract
From 1979 to 1989, global European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) analyses of many meteorological variables important in baroclinic storms have been bandpass filtered to highlight fluctuations on 2- to 8-day time scales in order to illuminate the relationships among the variables in baroclinic storm-track regions. Because of the greater zonal symmetry in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) versus the Northern Hemisphere (NH), it is possible to examine these relationships over a zonal sector without being dominated by local effects associated with jet stream entrance and exit regions of the storm tracks. The bandpassed variance of geopotential height is used to define the storm track, and its meridional profile has a pronounced midlatitude maximum in the SH. The locations of the jet stream and the variance maxima of meridional and zonal velocity components, vorticity, vertical motion, specific humidity, and temperature all bear a distinctive relationship to the storm track, but the lat... Abstract From 1979 to 1989, global European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) analyses of many meteorological variables important in baroclinic storms have been bandpass filtered to highlight fluctuations on 2- to 8-day time scales in order to illuminate the relationships among the variables in baroclinic storm-track regions. Because of the greater zonal symmetry in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) versus the Northern Hemisphere (NH), it is possible to examine these relationships over a zonal sector without being dominated by local effects associated with jet stream entrance and exit regions of the storm tracks. The bandpassed variance of geopotential height is used to define the storm track, and its meridional profile has a pronounced midlatitude maximum in the SH. The locations of the jet stream and the variance maxima of meridional and zonal velocity components, vorticity, vertical motion, specific humidity, and temperature all bear a distinctive relationship to the storm track, but the lat...

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