Modelling the Formation and Propagation of Orographic Rossby Waves

Sammanfattning: Orographic Rossby waves are the main mechanism by which the jet streams meander aroundthe Earth and have possibly far-reaching impacts on weather and climate (chapter 1). Hence,they are of particular importance to study and this project should serve as a starting point inwhat to consider when trying to model these waves. For example, we have to account forpressure gradients, Coriolis effect, orography, potential vorticity conservation and also Earth’scurvature at this scale. These are covered in detail in ch. 2 and adapted to the Shallow WaterEquations. In addition, some entry-level numerical techniques for solving these equations arepresented throughout ch. 2.4 and then implemented for the global-scale Shallow WaterEquations with conserved potential vorticity in ch. 3. The model is validated to work for typicalshallow water flows in a bath tub and passes common tests like the Gaussian curve test (ch.4.1). However, when considering atmospheric flows (ch. 4.2) it becomes evident that ourmodel, as well as our numerical methods are lacking and cannot reproduce Rossby waves ina stable manner. Hence, a heavily modified version of Hogan’s model (Hogan, n.d) isemployed with a simplified numerical scheme. With these corrections, orographic Rossbywaves appear to naturally form at appropriate locations. However, they do not fully exhibit theexpected behaviours discussed in ch. 2.2. Even Hogan’s model appears to have severelimitations as waves propagate in the wrong direction. Hence, this study is not complete andwarrants further development in order to be useful.