Rossby Waves in Zonally Opposing Mean Flow Behavior in….pdfVIP

1 MAY 2001 K U O E T A L . 1035 Rossby Waves in Zonally Opposing Mean Flow: Behavior in Northwest Pacific Summer Monsoon HUNG-CHI KUO,* JEN-HER CHEN, R. T. WILLIAMS, AND C.-P. CHANG Department of Meteorology, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California (Manuscript received 6 December 1999, in final form 27 July 2000) ABSTRACT The interactions between monsoon circulations and tropical disturbances in the Northwest Pacific, where the low-level mean flow is westerly in the west and easterly in the east, are studied with a barotropic model. The authors’ model results suggest that the scale contraction by the confluent background flow, the nonlinear dynamics, the effect, and the large-scale convergence are important for the energy and enstrophy accumulation near the region where the zonal flow reverses. The energy/enstrophy accumulation can be maintained with a continuous Rossby wave emanation upstream. The largest accumulation occurs when the emanating zonal wavelength is around 2000 km. Longer Rossby waves experience less scale contraction and nonlinear effects while shorter Rossby waves cannot hold a coherent structure against dispersive effects. The nonlinear energy/enstrophy accumulation mechanism is significantly different from previous linear energy accumulation theories. In the linear theories this is primarily accomplished by the slowdown of the Doppler- shifted group v