The phenomenon of "blocking" is a prototypical example of an atmospheric persistent anomaly. It is an important class of large scale disturbance from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. A challenge to the atmospheric scientist is to delineate the essence of its dynamics.
These images focus upon a pronounced episode of blocking over the North Atlantic Ocean. The results of its structure and dynamics reveal that the excitation of this blocking is intricately dependent upon both high-frequency cyclones as well as the seasonal planetary scale flow.
Generation:
These 19 images were derived from ECMWF data which was interpolated to a polar stereographic map of the northern hemisphere using an HP 9000/835 Unix minicomputer. A banded palette was generated using NCSA PalEdit to highlight specific features of the data. NCSA Layout was used to form the final image pairs. The 19 images were stored in HDF format using 256 color values, and can be viewed using the animation feature of NCSA Image.
Authors:
Scientific Research: Dr. Mankin Mak, Department Head
