In many global ocean climate models, mesoscale eddies are parameterized as along isopycnal diffusion and eddyinduced advection (or equivalently skew-diffusion). The eddy-induced advection flattens isopycnals and acts as a sink of available potential energy, whereas the isopycnal diffusion mixes tracers along neutral directions. While much effort has gone into estimating diffusivities associated...

Introduction Conclusions References

Polynyas and leads are key elements of the wintertime Arctic sea-ice cover. They play a crucial role in surface heat loss, potential ice formation and consequently in the seasonal sea-ice budget. While polynyas are generally sufficiently large to be observed with passive microwave satellite sensors, the monitoring of narrow leads requires the use of data at a higher spatial resolution. We apply...

5 In this paper, wintertime precipitation from a variety of observational datasets, 6 regional climate models (RCMs), and general circulation models (GCMs) is aver7 aged over the state of California (CA) and compared. Several averaging method8 ologies are considered and all are found to give similar values when model grid 9 spacing is less than 3◦. This suggests that CA is a reasonable size for...

Wintertime trends in mixed layer depth (MLD) were calculated in the Bay of Biscay over the period 1975-2010 using the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA) package. The reliability of the SODA database was confirmed correlating its results with those obtained from the experimental Argo database over the period 2003-2010. An iso-thermal layer depth (TLD) and an iso-pycnal layer depth (PLD) were ...

Synoptic extra-tropical cyclone and anticyclone trajectories have been constructed from mean daily sea level pressure (SLP) data using a new automated scheme. Frequency, intensity and trajectory characteristics of these transients have been summarized to form indices describing wintertime cyclonic and anticyclonic activity over the North-Eastern Pacific (east of 170 W) during 1950–2001. During ...

Considerable concern has been raised on the severe wintertime haze episodes over eastern China (ECN) where visibility (Vis) decline in winter is identified from 1973 to 2012 ( 0.68 km per 10 years or 26% in 40 years). Based upon the analysis of daily Vis and weather records, cold wave (CW) originating from high latitudes is found to increase Vis by 2.7 km on average because of its relatively st...

Low-level temperature inversions are a common feature of the wintertime troposphere in the Arctic and Antarctic. Inversion strength plays an important role in regulating atmospheric processes including air pollution, ozone destruction, cloud formation, and negative longwave feedback mechanisms that shape polar climate response to anthropogenic forcing. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) in...

A review is provided of stationary wave theory, the theory for the deviations from zonal symmetry of the climate. To help focus the discussion the authors concentrate exclusively on northern winter. Several theoretical issues, including the external Rossby wave dispersion relation and vertical structure, critical latitude absorption, the nonlinear response to orography, and the interaction of f...