Impact of different initial conditions on the growth of polar lows: idealised baroclinic channel simulations

The development of a polar low is simulated in an ideal baroclinic channel with the objective of studying the relative influence of different initial conditions on certain characteristics of the polar low. The basic state in the channel has a baroclinic jet at the tropopause level superposed by potential vorticity anomalies. The upper‐level perturbation leads to the genesis of a polar low through baroclinic instability. During its growth, the polar low is driven by a combination of baroclinic and convective processes as the vertical motion associated with the polar low is found to be forced simultaneously by the adiabatic and diabatic omega‐forcing terms in the quasi‐geostrophic omega equation. The degree of baroclinicity, surface heating and the scale of the upper‐level anomaly were each reduced, and static stability increased separately in a series of sensitivity experiments. The results show that the pattern of the vertical motion, the growth rate and phase speed of the polar low are highly sensitive to the modifications in the background conditions. In particular, the surface temperature and baroclinicity appear to be crucial in determining the strength of the vertical motion associated with the polar low. The scale and structure of the polar low are more vulnerable to the scale of the upper‐level anomaly and initial baroclinicity than to the rest of the parameters tested. In all the sensitivity experiments, the formation of the polar low gets delayed and its intensity, in terms of the surface pressure, reduced due to the modified initial conditions. The reduced intensity suppresses the tendency for a vertical coupling of upper‐ and lower‐level features of the polar low. Copyright © 2011 Royal Meteorological Society