For an imposed thermal forcing localized off the equator, it is known that conservation of absolute angular momentum in axisymmetric flow produces a nonlinear response once the forcing exceeds a critical amplitude. It is shown here that, for a moist atmosphere in convective quasi-equilibrium, the combination of wind-dependent ocean surface enthalpy fluxes and zonal momentum advection can provid...

Recent studies indicate that altimetric observations of the ocean’smesoscale eddy field reflect the combined influence of surface buoyancy and interior potential vorticity anomalies. The former have a surface-trapped structure, while the latter are oftenwell represented by the barotropic and first baroclinicmodes. To assess the relative importance of each contribution to the signal, it is usefu...

To produce an interpretation of the surface kinetic energy as measured by altimeters, a survey is made of the vertical structure of kinetic energy profiles in a large number of globally distributed long current meter records. Although the data are geographically confined primarily to a latitude band in the North Pacific, to the North Atlantic, and to a few moorings in the South Atlantic, the re...

1 Shock interactions with heavy gaseous elliptic cylinders: Two leeward-side shock competition modes and a heuristic model for interfacial circulation deposition at early times Abstract We identify two diierent modes, Types I and II, of interaction for planar shocks accelerating heavy prolate gaseous ellipses. These modes arise from diierent interactions of the incident shock (IS) and transmitt...