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Attribution and its application to mesoscale structure associated with tropopause folds
Author(s) -
Thorpe A. J.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
quarterly journal of the royal meteorological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.744
H-Index - 143
eISSN - 1477-870X
pISSN - 0035-9009
DOI - 10.1002/qj.49712354411
Subject(s) - tropopause , mesoscale meteorology , potential vorticity , meteorology , attribution , geology , climatology , computer science , vorticity , geography , vortex , troposphere , psychology , social psychology
It is important in meteorology to be able to establish a link between various features. This link in its strongest form would be referred to as ‘cause‐and‐effect’ but this is extremely difficult to establish for atmospheric flows. A weaker, but nonetheless powerful, link is ‘attribution’ which attempts to provide a way to associate various fundamental features, such as potential‐vorticity anomalies, to weather events involving regions of ascent. Attribution is not new and it is implicit in the way that atmospheric evolution is usually described. In this paper an attempt is made to define more precisely what are the steps and assumptions being made in such a method. These ideas become more concrete by applying them to a simple model of a two‐dimensional front at which there is a tropopause fold. the aim is to find the vertical motion attributable to the descended tropopause fold in an extra‐tropical cyclone. This is the first step in a longer programme of research designed to provide a test of the hypothesis that such a descended tropopause can trigger mesoscale phenomena such as convection and cyclones.