The purpose of the project is to understand quantitatively various aspects of small-scale physical processess including gravity waves, trapped Rossby waves, inertial instabilities, fine structure around the tropopause, layered and filamentary structures of tracers, and to elucidate their roles in the large-scale structure, circulations and oscillations of the middle atmosphere, using a high-resolution general circulation model (GCM). We have developed a T213L256 middle atmosphere GCM, which covers from the surface to about 80 km height with a high vertical resolution (300 m). No gravity wave parameterizations are included. Our GCM realistically simulates the extratropical general circulation in the stratosphere and mesosphere such as the polar night jet and summertime easterly jet. The stratopause semi-annual oscillation (S-SAO) and the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO)-like oscillation in the equatorial lower stratosphere are spontaneously generated in the GCM.

• On the origins of mesospheric gravity waves (English, Japanese)
• Wintertime temperature maximum at the subtropical stratopause in a T213L256 GCM (English, Japanese)
• Transport and mixing in the extratropical tropopause region in a high vertical resolution GCM (English, Japanese)

Members

• Kaoru Sato (Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sci., U. Tokyo)
• Shingo Watanabe (FRCGC)
• Yoshio Kawatani (FRCGC)
• Yoshihiro Tomikawa (NIPR)
• Kazuyuki Miyazaki (FRCGC)
• Masaaki Takahashi (AORI, U. Tokyo)

Activities

• International Conferences
• Japanese Domestic Conferences
• Publications

Group only

This project is supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 19204047 (PI: KS) of MEXT, Japan. The calculation was conducted using the Earth Simulator.