Equatorial Superrotation and Maintenance of the General Circulation in Two-Level Models

Abstract

Suarez and Duffy have noted an interesting bifurcation in a two-level gridpoint general circulation model when strong tropical heating is imposed. This bifurcation results in a model climatology with strong upper-level westerlies in the tropics. In this paper, it is argued that this bifurcation is essentially due to the dominant role played by extratropical baroclinic transients in the tropical angular momentum budget. A series of numerical experiments is analyzed with a global two-level primitive equation model, using spectral truncation in the horizontal. The model climatologies in these experiments fall into two categories: 1) conventional, that is, weak upper-level easterlies/westerlies in the tropics; and 2) superrotating, that is, strong upper-level westerlies in the tropics. An attempt is made to explain the maintenance of the general circulation in these two radically different climatologies by studying the properties of unstable normal modes for the two different time-mean states. The spectral characteristics of angular momentum transport due to transient eddies in these two climatologies are also discussed. To understand the meridional propagation of transient eddies, the notion of a ?modal? refractive index in the quasigeostrophic approximation is introduced. From this analysis it is concluded that the conventional climatology is stable to weak perturbations, with the ?restoring? force being provided primarily by extratropical baroclinic eddies. Strong perturbations completely change the propagation characteristics of these eddies, leading to a bifurcation of the general circulation. This has interesting implications for the range of validity of two-level models and the transitivity of tropospheric general circulation.