The Indian Ocean Dipole Mode (IODM) impacts many surrounding and remote regions of the Indian Ocean, with devastating floods over East Africa but severe droughts in countries surrounding Indonesia during a positive IODM event. Understanding the dynamics is important for seasonal prediction and climate projections, but the role of meridional temperature and circulation anomalies remains unclear....

Barometric pressure, surface temperature, and wind time series in the eastern equatorial Pacific are analyzed to determine if oceanic tropical instability wave (TIW) sea surface temperature variations cause barometric pressure gradients large enough to influence the atmospheric boundary layer. During the study period from April 2001 to September 2002, 11 TIWs propagated westward past 110!W, cau...

A linear coupled model for the atmosphere–upper-ocean system is proposed to highlight the mechanisms of decadal to interdecadal climate variability in the North Pacific. In this model, wind stress anomalies over the North Pacific are related to anomalies in the meridional temperature gradient of the upper ocean. The latter depends upon air–sea thermodynamical feedbacks and meridional heat trans...

Equatorial long-wave theory applies where a small horizontal aspect ratio between meridional and zonal length scales is assumed. In an idealized setting, the theory suggests that (i) meridional wind is small, (ii) geostrophic balance holds in the meridional direction, and (iii) inertio-gravity waves are small in amplitude or ‘‘filtered out.’’ In this paper a spectral data analysis method is use...

[1] Observational analysis has shown that when El NiñoSouthern Oscillation (ENSO) events typically reach their peak amplitude in boreal winter, the associated zonal wind anomalies abruptly shift southward so that the maximum anomalous zonal wind is located around 5 –7 S. Here, an analysis utilizing multiple wind products identifies a clear ENSO phase nonlinearity in the extent of this meridiona...

Observations of rapidly rotating solar-like stars show a significant mixture of opposite-polarity magnetic fields within their polar regions. To explain these observations, models describing the surface transport of magnetic flux demand the presence of fast meridional flows. Here, we link sub-surface and surface magnetic flux transport simulations to investigate (i) the impact of meridional cir...

A simple model of the thermohaline circulation (THC) is formulated, with the objective to represent explicitly the geostrophic force balance of the basinwide THC. The model comprises advective-diffusive density balances in two meridional-vertical planes located at the eastern and the western walls of a hemispheric sector basin. Boundary mixing constrains vertical motion to lateral boundary laye...

We analyse the kinematics of ∼ 400 000 stars for which the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) has obtained spectra. These stars, half giants and half dwarfs, mostly lie within 2.5 kpc of the Sun. We decompose the sample into hot and cold dwarfs, red-clump and non-clump giants. The kinematics of the clump giants are consistent with being identical with those of the giants as a whole. Without binn...

Data from a near co-located imaging Doppler interferometer (IDI) and SuperDARN radar recorded since 1996 have been analysed in a consistent manner to compare the derived mean winds and tides in the upper mesosphere. By comparing only days when both techniques were recording good quality meridional wind data it is shown that the SuperDARN radar winds and tides correlate best with the IDI height ...

The motion of a spherical particle in infinite linear flow and near a plane wall, subject to the slip boundary condition on both the particle surface and the wall, is studied in the limit of zero Reynolds number. In the case of infinite flow, an exact solution is derived using the singularity representation, and analytical expressions for the force, torque, and stresslet are derived in terms of...