A Review of Potential Vorticity and its Possible Application in the moist Atmospheric Flow

Potential vorticity (PV) has been served as a powerful and useful dynamic tracer for the understanding of the large-scale dynamics and synoptic variations in the atmosphere and oceans. Significant progress has been made on the application of PV. In recent decades there has been a substantial amount of work done on PV in a general moist atmosphere. In this paper PV and the generalized moist potential vorticity (GMPV) and their application in the tropical cyclones and mesoscale meteorological field are reviewed. The GMPV is derived for a real atmosphere (neither totally dry nor saturated) by introducing a generalized potential temperature instead of the potential temperature or equivalent potential temperature. Such a generalization can depict the moist effect on PV anomaly in the non-uniformly saturated atmosphere. A new convective vorticity vector (CVV) is introduced in connection with GMPV in order to diagnose the development of tropical deep convections.