• 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.