Air passing upward through the tropical tropopause is “marked” by an annually varying water vapor mixing ratio much as a tape recorder marks a magnetic tape; as the air ascends in the tropical stratosphere, these marks are effaced by a combination of vertical diffusion within the tropics and dilution of...
We show the signature of the tropical intraseasonal oscillation (TIO) in upper tropospheric moisture and dynamical fields, roughly between 200 and 100 hPa. Relationships among these fields are examined using lag-correlation analysis and using multivariate extended empirical orthogonal functions (MEEOFs), which maximize the shared explained variance among several fields for...
Observations of water vapor with high temporal and spatial resolution and good horizontal coverage just above the tropical tropopause have been scarce, but a preliminary version of such data has been developed using radiance measurements of the Microwave Limb Sounder. These data reveal distinct variations with periods in the ranges...
The three-dimensional (3-D) structure of stratospheric Kelvin waves is revealed
using data from the Microwave Limb Sounder for the period July 1992 to April 1993. Four Kelvin wave modes are identified, two for zonal wave number 1 (k = 1) and two for k = 2, using extended empirical orthogonal...
Connections, sometimes tenuous, have previously been noted between stratospheric
Kelvin waves and several stratospheric trace constituents. The present study finds
evidence of Kelvin wave signatures in ozone from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS)
and Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES) instruments aboard the Upper
Atmosphere Research Satellite. Predominant variations near...