Classification of Polar-Night Jet Oscillations and Their Relationship to Fast and Slow Variations in a Global Mechanistic Circulation Model of the Stratosphere and Troposphere

Abstract

Polar-night jet oscillation (PJO), which is a low-frequency intraseasonal oscillatory variation in the winter stratosphere, is analyzed statistically with a 14 000-yr-long dataset obtained with an idealized global mechanistic circulation model of the stratosphere and troposphere. After performing an empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis on the low-pass-filtered time series of the northern polar temperature, 10 647 PJO events are identified and classified into four groups. About 80% of them are two groups of warm events while the rest are two groups of cold events, which are newly identified variations with opposite sign from the warm events by the same EOF analysis. All of them show slow downward propagations of a positive or negative temperature anomaly, with a relatively short or long lifetime. Composite analysis with such a large number of samples shows that each group has its own typical relationship to unfiltered relatively fast variations in the polar stratosphere known as stratospheric sudden warming and polar vortex intensification and to the slow variation in the troposphere known as the Arctic Oscillation. Statistically significant evidence of the downward dynamical influence of PJO on the surface is obtained for a group of warm events with a longer lifetime.