Baroclinic and Barotropic Annular Variability in the Northern Hemisphere

AbstractLarge-scale variability in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) circulation can be viewed in the context of three primary types of structures: 1) teleconnection patterns, 2) a barotropic annular mode, and 3) a baroclinic annular mode. The barotropic annular mode corresponds to the northern annular mode (NAM) and has been examined extensively in previous research. Here the authors examine the spatial structure and time-dependent behavior of the NH baroclinic annular mode (NBAM).The NAM and NBAM have very different signatures in large-scale NH climate variability. The NAM emerges as the leading principal component (PC) time series of the zonal-mean kinetic energy. It dominates the variance in the wave fluxes of momentum, projects weakly onto the eddy kinetic energy and wave fluxes of heat, and can be modeled as Gaussian red noise with a time scale of ~10 days. In contrast, the NBAM emerges as the leading PC time series of the eddy kinetic energy. It is most clearly identified when the planetary-scale waves ...