The Shape of Continents , Air-Sea Interaction , and the Rising Branch of the Hadley Circulation

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Xie, Shang-Ping
Copyright Year	2003
Abstract	The differential solar radiation in the meridional direction is the ultimate drive for the global Hadley circulation, dictating that its rising branch and heavy rainfall should be located near the equator. This solar forcing of the atmosphere is indirect, however, since most of solar radiation absorption takes place at the surface of Earth. Over the tropical oceans, most of the absorbed solar energy is used for surface evaporation and the resultant water vapor is gathered by winds to fuel deep convection that is organized into zonally oriented rain bands. The ocean’s effect on tropical convection and hence the rising branch of the Hadley circulation is obvious; tropical rain belts are anchored on the warmest waters, with spatial patterns that can markedly deviate from the distribution of insolation. In particular, the rain band over the eastern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, called the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), is mysteriously displaced to the north of the equator in the annual-mean climatology, a distribution inexplicable from solar forcing alone. This chapter reviews the progress made in the past decade in understanding the coupled ocean-atmospheric dynamics that govern the rising branch of the Hadley circulation and places this progress in a historical perspective. This chapter focuses on the ITCZ over the eastern Pacific and Atlantic, while Webster (2004) in this volume discusses convection in the Indo–western Pacific sector. Wang et al. (2004a) is a global survey of air-sea interaction and its role in climate variability, including a comparative view for the three tropical oceans.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/users/xie/hadley4camera.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/~xie/hadley4camera.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/users/xie/hadley4print.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Absorption, Radiation Bands Blood Circulation Climate model Convection Environmental Wind Evaporation Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research INDO Resultant Solar Energy Spatial variability Water Vapor
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article