Abstract
Space‐time spectral analysis was applied to 17 years of twice daily, northern hemisphere sea‐level pressure grids. The results for each individual year were compared with values of the sea surface temperature averaged over a large region in the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean. This comparison revealed a positive correlation between the ocean temperature and the pressure variance at the zonal scales and frequencies generally associated with the gravest, westward propagating, zonal wave number 1, symmetric normal‐mode Rossby wave (i.e., the (1, 1) mode). Variations in the surface temperature in the tropical Pacific are known to be accompanied by large changes in the distribution of tropical precipitation; thus the present results suggest that latent heat release may be a major excitation mechanism for the (1, 1) Rossby normal mode.
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