[1] The anomalously strong hurricane activity in the Atlantic sector during the recent years led to a controversy about the impact of global warming on hurricane activity in the Atlantic sector. Here we show that the temperature difference between the tropical North Atlantic and the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans (IndoPacific) is a key parameter in controlling the vertical wind shear over t...

Barchan dunes are found where sand availability is low and wind direction quite constant. The two dimensional shear stress of the wind field and the sand movement by saltation and avalanches over a barchan dune are simulated. The model with one dimensional shear stress is extended including surface diffusion and lateral shear stress. The resulting final shape is compared to the results of the m...

It is known that gravity waves in the troposphere, which are often excited by preexisting convection, can favor or suppress the formation of new convection. Here it is shown that, in the presence of wind shear or barotropic wind, the gravity waves can create a more favorable environment on one side of preexisting convection than the other side. Both the nonlinear and linear analytic models deve...

[1] High-frequency physical observations from 40 temperate lakes were used to examine the relative contributions of wind shear (u*) and convection (w*) to turbulence in the surface mixed layer. Seasonal patterns of u* and w* were dissimilar; u* was often highest in the spring, while w* increased throughout the summer to a maximum in early fall. Convection was a larger mixed-layer turbulence sou...

Large-eddy simulation (LES) is used to investigate turbulence in a marginally-unstable stratified shear layer motivated by the observation of deep-cycle turbulence in the upper Equatorial Undercurrents. The initial condition consists of uniform shear and stratification profiles, and a constant gradient Richardson number Rig = 0.25. A constant wind stress forces turbulence in the upper surface l...

Atmospheric wind shears control the irregularity structure in the E-region. Near 100 km altitude, where the ion collision frequency is much larger than the ion cyclotron frequency, the degree of shear turning and the direction of maximum shear gradient determine the location of the E-layer peak. The effects of speed shears on the three-dimensional structure of the E-layer are modeled using a sy...

[1] Understanding and quantifying the multiscale interactions between surface shear stress and velocity in the boundary layer is essential to improving boundary condition parameterizations used in numerical models of turbulent boundary layers. In this study, high-frequencymeasurements obtained in a wind tunnel are used to identify dominant scales of interaction (quantified in terms of scale-dep...

Several bulk model–based entrainment parameterizations for the atmospheric convective boundary layer (CBL) with wind shear are reviewed and tested against large-eddy simulation (LES) data to evaluate their ability to model one of the basic integral parameters of convective entrainment—the entrainment flux ratio. Test results indicate that many of these parameterizations fail to correctly reprod...

The authors investigate the effects of cloud–radiation interaction and vertical wind shear on convective ensembles interacting with large-scale dynamics in cloud-resolving model simulations, with the large-scale circulation parameterized using the weak temperature gradient approximation. Numerical experiments with interactive radiation are conducted with imposed surface heat fluxes constant in ...