Final Technical Report on NSF Grant DES 75-10719, "Tropical Wave Dynamics"

Abstract

This research may be divided into the following three parts: a) waves forced by condensation heating in the troposphere, b) the local barotropic instability produced by a spatially varying basic flow, c) the numerical modeling of the wave-basic flow interacting system. In the first part, the problem of the vertical structure of tropical waves generated by cumulus heating is treated for the following two cases: 1) heating is controlled by large-scale low-level convergence and 2) heating receives no feedback from This research may be divided into the following three parts: a) waves forced by condensation heating in the troposphere, b) the local barotropic instability produced by a spatially varying basic flow, c) the numerical modeling of the wave-basic flow interacting system. In the first part, the problem of the vertical structure of tropical waves generated by cumulus heating is treated for the following two cases: 1) heating is controlled by large-scale low-level convergence and 2) heating receives no feedback from large-scale motion. In the first case it is shown that waves which have a short vertical wavelength relative to the vertical scale of heating are stable, and the structure of the most unstable solution is computed...