and key graphics such as waves appear in a seemingly chaotic fashion. What are these waves?
Entire books have been written about wave theory, both in meteorology, other branches of physics and even diverse topics such as stock trading. A complex pattern of waves appears on your typical
upper-level
atmospheric world map latitude longitude shown for clarity.
We first examine the broad waves –
huge
up and down patterns spanning a distance up to half way around the globe and reaching 30 or more degrees latitude up and down. Recall that the world map latitude longitude span zero to 90 degrees north and south and zero to 180 degrees east and west respectively.
Wave number identifies the number of main waves on each hemisphere – usually three or four, but can vary from 2 to 5. Large things like oceans and mountains create these Rossby or planetary waves and the waves blanket high temperature regions and shelter them from colder air masses. This is where we see our large-scale upper ridges and
troughs.
These waves can be hard to identify sometimes and may require maps from two or three adjacent time frames to get a better idea of their locations. However, long waves do not move very fast through their world map latitude longitude ranges.
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Short waves move more quickly, though. They travel eastward down the long wave and show up as a bump on the larger trend. This is where we label most of our upper troughs and ridges.
We also find that they are tied to maximum and minimum values in
vorticity,
with our troughs associated with higher vorticity and ridges with minimum vorticity. In this way, a short wave trough commonly indicates an axis of maximum vorticity.
So what?
This explanation ties in with weather in this fashion: air rises and clouds form ahead of a trough, while it descends and clouds dissipate in front of a ridge.
In fact
vertical motion
is responsible for this cloud co-relation. Also, these relations assist analysts in finding world map latitude longitude troughs and ridges by comparing to a
satellite photo,
especially where there is little other data to use, such as over the oceans.