Signatures of midlatitude heat waves in Rossby wave variability spectra

This work aims at identifying extreme circulation conditions such as heat waves in modal space which is defined by eigensolutions of the linearized primitive equations. Here, the Rossby waves are represented in terms of Hough harmonics that are an orthogonal and complete expansion set allowing Rossby wave diagnostics in terms of their total (kinetic and available potential) energies. We expect that this diagnostic provides a more clear picture of the Rossby wave variability spectra compared to the common Fourier decomposition along a latitude belt. 

The probability distributions of Rossby wave energies are analysed separately for the zonal mean flow, for the planetary and synoptic zonal wavenumbers. The robustness is ensured by considering the four reanalyses ERA5, ERA-Interim, JRA-55 and MERRA. A single wave is characterized by Gaussianity in the complex Hough amplitudes and by a chi-square distribution for the energies. We find that the distributions of the energy anomalies in the wavenumber space are non-Gaussian with almost the same positive skewness in the four reanalyses.  The skewness increases during persistent heat waves for all energy anomaly distributions, in agreement with the recent trend of increased subseasonal variance in large-scale Rossby waves and decreased variance at synoptic scales. The new approach offers a selective filtering to physical space. The reconstructed circulation during heat waves is dominated by large-scale anticyclonic systems in northeastern Europe with zonal wavenumbers 2 and 3, in agreement with previous studies, thereby demonstrating physical meaningfulness of the skewness.