Standing and Travelling Wave Contributions to the Persistent Ridge-Trough Over North America During Winter 2013/14

Abstract:

The winter season over North America during 2013/14 was dominated by a persistent ridge-trough that brought warm and dry conditions to the southwestern U.S., and markedly cold temperatures to central and eastern North America [Wang et al., 2014; Hartmann, 2015]. In addition, several cold air outbreaks occurred during the winter season, the strongest of which was around 7 January 2014 and led to minimum daily temperature records being set at many weather stations including Atlanta, Austin, Chicago and New York [Screen et al., in press]. This study uses a novel decomposition of wave variability into standing and travelling components [Watt-Meyer and Kushner, 2015] to diagnose the anomalous circulation of the 2013/14 winter season. This spectral decomposition is an improvement on previous methods because it explicitly accounts for the covariance between standing and travelling waves, and because the real-space components of the signal can be easily reconstructed. An index representing the ridge-trough dipole is computed using mid-tropospheric heights and shown to be well correlated with surface temperatures over central and eastern North America. The contributions to this dipole index from standing waves, westward travelling waves, and eastward travelling waves are calculated. The analysis demonstrates that the cold air outbreak of 7 January 2014 was driven by a synoptic wave of record breaking amplitude intensifying a persistent background amplification of the typical ridge-trough structure seen during North American winter.