Dynamic Tropopause
Posted by JAC on 9/18/2010, 8:48 pm
One thing I like to look at is the dynamic tropopause.

Tropopause is the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere.

Blue indicates a low altitude and red a high altitude tropopause.

The boundary between the two is where the jet stream flows.

The waves they make as the move west to east are called Rossby waves.

A cold front is one that moves blue into a red region.

So, a TC is a vertical column of rotating air that basically exists from the ocean surface to the tropopause.

As a TC moves from a red region to a blue region the tropopause it sees is lower.

Therefore the vertical column of air becomes compressed.

Because of conservation of angular momentum the air column has to rotate slower as it gets compressed.

The technical term is called Potential Vorticity Advection










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Why do troughs overpower hurricanes? - Gianmarc, 9/18/2010, 4:39 pm
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