Collaborative Research: Stratospheric Dynamics

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This award provides support for a continuing collaboration between Dr. Plumb and Dr. Polvani at Columbia University (ATM-9818656). Their previous work was focused on various nonlinear aspects of atmospheric dynamics, especially, but not only, of planetary scale Rossby wave, and their interaction with the background circulation. Those studies relied heavily on the use of models - both high-resolution two-dimensional (one-layer) models and three-dimensional, global models - and fluid dynamics theory. Under this award the principal investigators will restrict their work to stratospheric dynamics. Despite considerable progress in this area over the past two decades, several key issues remained incompletely answered. The issues to be investigated are: (1) how the seasonal evolution of the winter stratosphere and the timing of the springtime final warming depend on the imposed wave climatology; (2) what determines the location of the subtropical "transport barrier", bounding the midlatitude surf zone; (3) how the surf zone and the induced meridional circulation interact; and (4) whether dynamical systems theory can offer an objective approach to the quantification of isentropic transport processes. The principal investigators will tackle these problems using a combination of theory and several different models.