Arctic and Antarctic cells in the troposphere

The three-cell model, including the Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells in each of two hemispheres, has been accepted for a long time and the strongest Hadley cell has been used to study the climate change in recent years. However, two questions, why the upper level flow of Ferrel cell does not match ob...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theoretical and applied climatology 2016-07, Vol.125 (1-2), p.1-12
Main Authors: Qian, Weihong, Wu, Kaijun, Liang, Haoyuan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Aquatic Pollution
Atmospheric circulation
Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution
Atmospheric Sciences
Climate change
Climate science
Climatology
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Global temperature changes
Original Paper
Polar environments
Troposphere
Waste Water Technology
Water Management
Water Pollution Control
Wind
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Summary:The three-cell model, including the Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells in each of two hemispheres, has been accepted for a long time and the strongest Hadley cell has been used to study the climate change in recent years. However, two questions, why the upper level flow of Ferrel cell does not match observations and how many cells exist in the two polar regions, still exist. Using three different reanalysis datasets for the last 30 years, this paper showed that there might be an additional cell in each of two polar regions. The analyses of meridional-vertical section streamline (MSS), meridional-mass stream function (MSF), and climatic vertical velocity provide some evidences to support the existence of the new Arctic and Antarctic cells located in the troposphere. Thus, an eight-cell model in the global troposphere is proposed in this study. The maximum intensity of the Hadley cell in the boreal winter indicated by MSF in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) is stronger than that of the Ferrel cell for about 4.8 times, so the upper level northeasterly wind of Ferrel cell is too weak to be detected when compared with the stronger southwesterly wind of the Hadley cell.
ISSN:0177-798X
1434-4483
DOI:10.1007/s00704-015-1485-z