• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.107-116
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• 2016

Stability of the barotropic Rossby-Haurwitz wave is investigated using the numerical models on the global domain. The Rossby-Haurwitz wave under investigation is composed of the basic zonal flow of super-rotation and a finite amplitude spherical harmonic wave. The Rossby-Haurwitz wave is given as either steady or unsteady wave by adjusting the strength of the super-rotating zonal flow. Stability as well as the growth rate of the wave in the numerical simulation is determined by comparing the perturbation amplitude at two different time stages. Unstable modes of the Rossby-Haurwitz wave exhibited a horizontal structure composing of various zonal-wavenumber components. The vorticity perturbation for some modes showed a discontinuity around the area of weak flow, which was found robust regardless of the horizontal resolution of the model. Fourier finite element model was shown to generate the unstable mode in earlier stage of the time integration due to less accuracy compared to the spherical harmonic spectral model. Taking the overall accuracy of the models into consideration, the time by which the unstable mode begin to dominate over the spherical harmonic wave was estimated.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.173-181
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• 2017

The stability of the steady Rossby-Haurwitz wave (R-H wave) in the nondivergent barotropic model (NBM) on the sphere was investigated with the normal mode method. The linearized NBM equation with respect to the R-H wave was formulated into the eigenvalue-eigenvector problem consisting of the huge sparse matrix by expanding the variables with the spherical harmonic functions. It was shown that the definite threshold R-H wave amplitude for instability could be obtained by the normal mode method. It was revealed that some unstable modes were stationary, which tend to amplify without the time change of the spatial structure. The maximum growth rate of the most unstable mode turned out to be in almost linear proportion to the R-H wave amplitude. As a whole, the growth rate of the unstable mode was found to increase with the zonal- and total-wavenumber. The most unstable mode turned out to consist of more-than-one zonal wavenumber, and in some cases, the mode exhibited a discontinuity over the local domain of weak or vanishing flow. The normal mode method developed here could be readily extended to the basic state comprised of multiple zonalwavenumber components as far as the same total wavenumber is given.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.936-946
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• 2007

Analytical geopotential field in balance with the sectoral mode (the first symmetric mode with respect to the equator) of the Rossby-Haurwitz wave on the inclined rotation axis was derived in presence of superrotation background flow. The balanced field was obtained by inverting the divergence equation with the time derivative being zero. The inversion consists of two steps, i.e., the evaluation of nonlinear forcing terms and the finding of analytical solutions based on the Poisson's equation. In the second step, the forcing terms in the from of Legendre function were readily inverted due to the fact that Legendre function is the eigenfunction of the spherical Laplacian operator, while other terms were solved either by introducing a trial function or by integrating the Legendre equation. The balanced field was found to be expressed with six zonal wavenumber components, and shown to be of asymmetric structure about the equator. In association with asymmetricity, the advantageous point of the balanced field as a validation method for the numerical model was addressed. In special cases where the strength of the background flow is a half of or exactly the same as the rotation rate of the Earth it was revealed that one of the zonal wavenumber components vanishes. The analytical balanced field was compared with the geopotential field which was obtained using a spherical harmonics spectral model. It was found that the normalized difference lied in the order of machine rounding, indicating the reliability of the analytical results. The stability of the sectoral mode of Rossby-Haurwitz wave and the associated balanced field was discussed, comparing with the flrst antisymmetric mode.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.476-483
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• 2015

The high-order Laplacian-type filter, which is capable of providing isotropic and sharp cut-off filtering on the spherical domain, is essential in processing geophysical data. In this study, a spherical high-order filter was designed by combining the Fourier method with finite difference-method in the longitude and latitude, respectively. The regular grid system was employed in the filter, which has uniform angular spacing including the poles. The singularity at poles was eliminated by incorporating variable transforms and continuity-matching boundary conditions across poles. The high-order filter was assessed using the Rossby-Haurwitz wave, the observed geopotential, and observed wind field. The performance of the filter was found comparable to the filter based on the Galerkin procedure. The filter, employing the finite difference method, can be designed to give any target order of accuracy, which is an important advantage being unavailable in other methods. The computational complexity is represented with 2n-1 diagonal matrices solver with n being the target order of accuracy. Along with the availability of arbitrary target-order, it is also advantageous that the filter can adopt the reduced grid to increase computational efficiency.