Equatorial Mountain Torques and Cold Surge Preconditioning

Abstract

The evolution of the two components of the equatorial mountain torque (EMT) applied by mountains on the atmosphere is analyzed in the NCEP reanalysis. A strong lagged relationship between the EMT component along the Greenwich axis TM1 and the EMT component along the 90°E axis TM2 is found, with a pronounced signal on TM1 followed by a signal of opposite sign on TM2. It is shown that this result holds for the major massifs (Antarctica, the Tibetan Plateau, the Rockies, and the Andes) if a suitable axis system is used for each of them. For the midlatitude mountains, this relationship is in part associated with the development of cold surges. Following these results, two hypotheses are made: (i) the mountain forcing on the atmosphere is well measured by the regional EMTs and (ii) this forcing partly drives the cold surges. To support these, a purely dynamical linear model is proposed: it is written on the sphere, uses an f-plane quasigeostrophic approximation, and includes the mountain forcings. In this model, a positive (negative) peak in TM1 produced by a mountain massif in the Northern (Southern) Hemisphere is due to a large-scale high surface pressure anomaly poleward of the massif. At a later stage, high pressure and low temperature anomalies develop in the lower troposphere east of the mountain, explaining the signal on TM2 and providing the favorable conditions for the cold surge development. It is concluded that the EMT is a good measure of the dynamical forcing of the atmospheric flow by the mountains and that the poleward forces exerted by mountains on the atmosphere are substantial drivers of the cold surges, at least in their early stage. Therefore, the EMT time series can be an important diagnostic to assess the representation of mountains in general circulation models.