The Life Cycles of Some Nonlinear Baroclinic Waves

Abstract Some aspects of the nonlinear behavior of mid-latitude baroclinic waves are investigated by means of a series of integrations of the primitive equations with spherical geometry. Each integration has as initial conditions a balanced zonal flow perturbed by a small-amplitude disturbance of normal-mode form. Results are presented in detail for several zonal flows and perturbations which are confined initially to either zonal wavenumber 6 or zonal wavenumber 9. In each case a disturbance grows by baroclinic instability and develops a structure in some agreement with the usual synoptic picture of an occluding system. Its growth rate at low levels decreases more rapidly than that at higher levels, as found by Gall using a more severely truncated model, and upper-level amplitudes become larger relative to surface values than in the initial linear mode. This is more marked for wavenumber 6 than for wavenumber 9, and differences in linear structure are thus enhanced in the nonlinear regime. Barotropic pro...