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Potential Vorticity


H2Otown_WX

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Okay, I'm making a little post about potential vorticity. The way my professor described it (and I assume this is highly simplified) is that air near the equator has very low cyclonic vorticity but as it is advected north, its relative vorticity obviously increases since f increases with latitude. And since the expression for potential vorticity is:

(C_r + f)/h and it is conserved, the height of air parcels must increase as they gain latitude. Since this class I'm in is a theoretical hydrodynamics class, we didn't go into the value of applying potential vorticity to operational forecasting. If anyone could give me some input on that it would be much appreciated. :)

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With the hires models the PV handling isn't much of an issue now it was 15 years ago. Sometimes models in the MR are too weak with the northern Jet and there is a bigger bomb then expected. I don't know how much of it has to do with them underestimating the PV of the disturbances though.

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Okay, I'm making a little post about potential vorticity. The way my professor described it (and I assume this is highly simplified) is that air near the equator has very low cyclonic vorticity but as it is advected north, its relative vorticity obviously increases since f increases with latitude. And since the exp<b></b>ression for potential vorticity is:

(C_r + f)/h and it is conserved, the height of air parcels must increase as they gain latitude. Since this class I'm in is a theoretical hydrodynamics class, we didn't go into the value of applying potential vorticity to operational forecasting. If anyone could give me some input on that it would be much appreciated. :)

When you get some time, this page bridges some PV theory with operational.

http://www.atmos.illinois.edu/~snesbitt/ATMS505/stuff/12%20IPV.pdf

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