A conceptual model is constructed based upon the Bjerknes hypothesis of tropical atmosphere–ocean interaction. It is shown that strong feedbacks among the trade winds, equatorial zonal sea surface temperature contrast, and upper-ocean heat content occur in the tropical Pacific basin. Coupled atmosphere–ocean dynamics produce both the strong Pacific cold-tongue climate state and the El Niño–Sout...

[1] As part of the southeast Asian monsoon system, the South China Sea (SCS) is characterized by monsoon wind transition from northeasterly to southwesterly in the boreal spring. Correspondingly, a spring warm pool (SWP) with mixed layer temperature warmer than 29 C is formed and peaked in May over the central SCS and then decays in June. Calculations of the heat budget showed that the surface ...

The mesoscale structure of the low-level flow and the character of the turbulence are investigated for a warm front as it approached the prominent terrain of the Pacific Northwest in the vicinity of Vancouver Island. Flightlevel and airborne Doppler radar measurements collected from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration P-3 research aircraft on 9 December 1995 during the Coastal Obs...

The existence, scale, and growth rates of subsynoptic-scale warm-core circulations are investigated with a simple parameterization for latent heat release in a nonconvective basic state using a linear two-layer shallow-water model. For a range of baroclinic flows from moderate to high Richardson number, conditionally stable lapse rates approaching saturated adiabats consistently yield the most ...

This paper presents a simple theoretical argument to isolate the conditions under which a tropical cyclone can rapidly develop a warm-core thermal structure and subsequently approach a steady state. The theoretical argument is based on the balanced vortex model and, in particular, on the associated transverse circulation equation and the geopotential tendency equation. These second-order partia...

The asymmetry of the western North Pacific (WNP) low-level atmospheric circulation anomalies between the El Niño and La Niña mature winter is examined. An anomalous WNP cyclone (WNPC) center during La Niña tends to shift westward relative to an anomalous WNP anticyclone (WNPAC) center during El Niño. Two factors may contribute to this asymmetric response. The first factor is the longitudinal sh...

We observed the bright phase of the 2003 outburst of the Galactic black hole candidate H 1743−322 in Xrays simultaneously with Chandra and RXTE on four occasions. The Chandra/HETGS spectra reveal narrow, variable (He-like) Fe XXV and (H-like) Fe XXVI resonance absorption lines. In the first observation, the Fe XXVI line has a FWHM of 1800± 400 km/s and a blue-shift of 700± 200 km/s, suggesting ...

[1] The surface of maximum wind (SMW) is used as a frame for examining spatial and temporal variability in the vertical position of fast upper tropospheric winds over the Northern Hemisphere during winter. At a given observation time in a gridded data set, the SMW is defined as the surface passing through the fastest analyzed wind above each grid node, with a vertical search domain restricted t...

We have mapped the superwind/halo region of the nearby starburst galaxy M82 in the midinfrared with Spitzer−IRS. The spectral regions covered include the H2 S(1)–S(3), [Ne II], [Ne III] emission lines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) features. We estimate the total warmH2 mass and the kinetic energy of the outflowing warmmolecular gas to be between Mwarm ∼ 5 and 17 × 106 M and EK ∼ 6 a...