Kyle L. Swanson

This paper reviews the current state of observational, theoretical, and modeling knowledge of the midlatitude storm tracks of the Northern Hemisphere cool season.

The dynamics of quasi-geostrophic flow with uniform potential vorticity reduces to the evolution of buoyancy, or potential temperature, on horizontal boundaries. There is a formal resemblance to two-dimensional flow, with surface temperature playing the role of vorticity, but a different relationship between the flow and the advected scalar creates several distinctive features. A series of examples are described which highlight some of these features: the evolution of an elliptical vortex; the start-up vortex shed by flow over a mountain; the instability of temperature filaments; the ‘edge wave’ critical layer; and mixing in an overturning edge wave. Characteristics of the direct cascade of the tracer variance to small scales in homogeneous turbulence, as well as the inverse energy cascade, are also described. In addition to its geophysical relevance, the ubiquitous generation of secondary instabilities and the possibility of finite-time collapse make this system a potentially important, numerically tractable, testbed for turbulence theories.

The study of networks has recently exploded into a major research tool in many areas of science. The discovery of “small world” and scale-free networks has led to many new insights about the collective behavior of a large number of interacting agents and complex systems. Here we introduce the basic ideas behind networks, as well as some initial applications of networks to the climate system. Our results suggest that the climate system exhibits aspects of small-world networks as well as scale-free networks, with supernodes corresponding to major teleconnection patterns. This result suggests that the organization of teleconnections may play a role in the stability of the climate system. In addition, preliminary work suggests that temporal changes in the network's architecture may be used to identify signatures of global change. These and other applications suggest that networks provide a new tool for investigating and reconstructing climate dynamics from both models and observations.

We construct the networks of the surface temperature field for El Niño and for La Niña years and investigate their structure. We find that the El Niño network possesses significantly fewer links and lower clustering coefficient and characteristic path length than the La Niña network, which indicates that the former network is less communicative and less stable than the latter. We conjecture that because of this, predictability of temperature should decrease during El Niño years. Here we verify that indeed during El Niño years predictability is lower compared to La Niña years.