Eady Model

The Eady Model is an atmospheric model for baroclinic instability first posed by British meteorologist Eric Eady in 1949 based on his PhD work at Imperial College London. The Eady Model is an atmospheric model for baroclinic instability first posed by British meteorologist Eric Eady in 1949 based on his PhD work at Imperial College London. The Eady Model makes several assumptions about the state of the atmosphere. First, the Eady Model assumes the atmosphere is composed of fluid obeying quasi-geostrophic motion. Second, the Eady Model assumes a constant Coriolis parameter. The Eady Model also assumes a constant static stability parameter and that fluctuations in the density of the air are small (obeys the Boussinesq approximation). Structurally, the Eady Model is bounded by two flat layers or “rigid lids”: one layer representing the Earth's surface and the other the tropopause at fixed height H. To simplify numerical solutions, the Eady Model also assumes rigid walls longitudinally at x=-L and x=L. Lastly, the Eady model assumes that there is constant shear in the zonal component of the mean state wind; the mean state zonal wind varies linearly with altitude.