Abstract
A two-level spherical linear primitive-equation model is used to discuss the atmosphere's winter geopotential response to a localized heating in middle latitudes. It is shown that the response in the surface geopotential and potential temperature is largest for wave number one and decreases as the inverse of the zonal wave number for the next few waves. The response to heating has downstream warm lows and upstream cold highs and can be described simply as having zonal advection of temperature balancing the perturbation heating. Next, several low-order general-circulation-model anomaly experiments are run and compared to the linear model. It is shown that if the noise in the system is not too much larger than the linear solution or if the zonal state of the general circulation model is not close to linear resonance, linear theory can describe the time averaged results of the GCM. DOI: 10.1111/j.2153-3490.1980.tb00968.x
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