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The role of monsoon‐like zonally asymmetric heating in interhemispheric transport
Author(s) -
Chen Gang,
Orbe Clara,
Waugh Darryn
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: atmospheres
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-8996
pISSN - 2169-897X
DOI - 10.1002/2016jd026427
Subject(s) - climatology , troposphere , atmospheric sciences , monsoon , hadley cell , middle latitudes , radiative equilibrium , southern hemisphere , environmental science , baroclinity , atmospheric circulation , boreal , northern hemisphere , radiative transfer , general circulation model , geology , climate change , oceanography , physics , paleontology , quantum mechanics
While the importance of the seasonal migration of the zonally averaged Hadley circulation on interhemispheric transport of trace gases has been recognized, few studies have examined the role of the zonally asymmetric monsoonal circulation. This study investigates the role of monsoon‐like zonally asymmetric heating on interhemispheric transport using a dry atmospheric model that is forced by idealized Newtonian relaxation to a prescribed radiative equilibrium temperature. When only the seasonal cycle of zonally symmetric heating is considered, the mean age of air in the Southern Hemisphere since last contact with the Northern Hemisphere midlatitude boundary layer is much larger than the observations. The introduction of monsoon‐like zonally asymmetric heating not only reduces the mean age of tropospheric air to more realistic values but also produces an upper tropospheric cross‐equatorial transport pathway in boreal summer that resembles the transport pathway simulated in the NASA Global Modeling Initiative Chemistry Transport Model driven with Modern‐Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications meteorological fields. These results highlight that the monsoon‐induced eddy circulation plays an important role in the interhemispheric transport of long‐lived chemical constituents.