Identification and climatology of Southern Hemisphere mobile fronts in a modern reanalysis

I Simmonds; K Keay; JAT Bye

Journal article

Identification and climatology of Southern Hemisphere mobile fronts in a modern reanalysis

I Simmonds, K Keay, JAT Bye

Journal of Climate | Published : 2012

DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00100.1

Abstract

Presented here is an objective approach to identify, characterize, and track Southern Hemisphere mobile fronts in hemispheric analyses of relatively modest resolution, such as reanalyses. Among the principles in its design were that it should be based on broadscale synoptic considerations and be as simple and easily understood as possible. The resulting Eulerian scheme has been applied to the European Centre for Medium-RangeWeather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA)-Interim and a climatology of frontal characteristics, at both the 10-mand 850-hPa levels, derived for the period 1 January 1989-28 February 2009. The knowledge of the character of these features is central to understanding weath..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Ian Simmonds Author

John Bye Author

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

Parts of this research were made possible by a grant from the Australian Research Council. The ERA Interim data used in this paper were provided courtesy of ECMWF and are freely available via the ECMWF data server (http://data.ecmwf.int/). We wish to thank Mike Willmott of the Observations and Engineering Branch, Bureau of Meteorology, for his assistance in preparing the satellite image in Fig. 1. We are also grateful for the very constructive comments of two reviewers.