Methods of Identification Coherent Structures in Atmospheric Numerical Data

Abstract

Coherent structures (CS), or vortices, are playing an important role in Earth’s climate system, since they are responsible for a significant part in the momentum, heat, mass, etc., transportation of any fluid, including the atmosphere and the ocean. This is true for all scales of motion, but it is especially important for more chaotic mesoscale structures. Automatic identification of CS has the potential to enable automatic categorization of mesoscale vortices and the development of a general mesoscale climatology. Currently, there is no objective definition of a vortex, mainly due to difficulties in determining its outer boundary. Despite this challenge, recent developments in atmospheric turbulent dynamics have attempted to address this issue. In this study, we examined the implementation of three most popular Eulerian methods for identifying CSs in mesoscale-resolving gridded data. Our primary objective was to determine the most effective method for vortex identification on a scale relevant to Earth science data.

Keywords

• coherent structures
• mesoscale atmospheric processes
• vortex identification
• numerical modeling