COMPARISON OF LINEAR AND NONLINEAR WAVES ASSOCIATED WITH STEADY-STATE FORCING SOURCES

Low-frequency phenomena in the atmosphere are intimately related to stationary waves and, in a sense, the former may even be viewed as the time-varying part of the quasi-stationary waves themselves, Much attention has been focused on nonlinear interactions in the conceptual study on stationary waves. Linear and nonlinear primitive-equation baroclinic spectral models are adopted to investigate the response of stationary waves to largescale mechanical forcing and steady-state thermal forcing, both idealized and realistic, followed by calculations of the EP fluxes and three-dimensional wave activity fluxes(Plumb, 1985) for both the linear and nonlinear solutions. Results show that when the forcing source grows intense enough to be comparable to the real one, non-linear interaction becomes very important, especially for the maintenance of tropical and polar stationary waves. Care should be taken, however, in using the EP flux and Plumb's 3-D flux for diagnostic analysis of observational data as they are highly sensitive to nonlinear interaction.