Abstract
An attempt was made to include the thermal effects of gravity wave breaking in the energy budget to investigate their effect on the mean circulation. Various unknown coefficients needed for the wave breaking parameterization made it difficult to assess their exact effect. However, the residual circulation was found to be relatively insensitive to the effective Prandtl number chosen. For large effective Prandtl numbers, the direct thermal effect of gravity wave breaking on the mesospheric residual circulations is very small. An independent evaluation of the overall impact of gravity wave breaking on the thermal budget comes from the requirements that the globally averaged net mass flux across a pressure surface be zero. This mass balance condition is violated for an effective Prandtl number of unity, and is more closely adhered to for large Prandtl numbers. -from Authors
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1093-1111 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1991 |
| Externally published | Yes |