Equatorial wave expansion of instantaneous flows for diagnosis of equatorial waves from data: Formulation and illustration

Abstract

This paper presents a method for expanding horizontal flow variables in data using the free solutions to the shallow-water system as a basis set. This method for equatorial wave expansion of instantaneous flows (EWEIF) uses dynamic constraints in conjunction with projections of data onto parabolic cylinder functions to determine the amplitude of all equatorial waves. EWEIF allows us to decompose an instantaneous wave flow into individual equatorial waves with a presumed equivalent depth without using temporal or spatial filtering a priori. Three sets of EWEIF analyses are presented. The first set is to confirm that EWEIF is capable of recovering the individual waves constructed from theoretical equatorial wave solutions under various scenarios. The other two sets demonstrate the ability of the EWEIF method to derive time series of individual equatorial waves from instantaneous wave fields without knowing a priori exactly which waves exist in the data as well as their spatial and temporal scales using outputs of an equatorial β-channel shallow-water model and ERA-Interim data. The third set of demonstrations shows, for the first time, the continuous evolutions of individual equatorial waves in the stratosphere whose amplitude is synchronized with the background zonal wind as predicted by quasi-biennial oscillation theory.