Nonlinear traveling waves for the skeleton of the Madden-Julian oscillation

DOI10.4310/CMS.2016.V14.N2.A11zbMATH Open1332.74035arXiv1510.00880OpenAlexW2964116461MaRDI QIDQ259376FDOQ259376

Authors: Shengqian Chen, Samuel N. Stechmann 

Publication date: 11 March 2016

Published in: Communications in Mathematical Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the dominant component of intraseasonal (30-90 days) variability in the tropical atmosphere. Here, traveling wave solutions are presented for the MJO skeleton model of Majda and Stechmann. The model is a system of nonlinear partial differential equations that describe the evolution of the tropical atmosphere on planetary (10,000-40,000 km) spatial scales. The nonlinear traveling waves come in four types, corresponding to the four types of linear wave solutions, one of which has the properties of the MJO. In the MJO traveling wave, the convective activity has a pulse-like shape, with a narrow region of enhanced convection and a wide region of suppressed convection. Furthermore, an amplitude-dependent dispersion relation is derived, and it shows that the nonlinear MJO has a lower frequency and slower propagation speed than the linear MJO. By taking the small-amplitude limit, an analytic formula is also derived for the dispersion relation of linear waves. To derive all of these results, a key aspect is the model's conservation of energy, which holds even in the presence of forcing. In the limit of weak forcing, it is shown that the nonlinear traveling waves have a simple sech-squared waveform.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.00880

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zbMATH Keywords

partial differential equationsnonlinear traveling wavessolitary wavestropical climatetropical intraseasonal variability

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

PDEs in connection with fluid mechanics (35Q35) General theory of rotating fluids (76U05) Nonlinear waves in solid mechanics (74J30) Meteorology and atmospheric physics (86A10)

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• Tropical intraseasonal variability and the stochastic skeleton method
• Multiscale asymptotics for the skeleton of the Madden-Julian oscillation and tropical-extratropical interactions
• A suite of skeleton models for the MJO with refined vertical structure
• Spatial and temporal averaging windows and their impact on forecasting: exactly solvable examples

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