Stratospheric influence on idealised baroclinic life cycles

The importance of understanding the dynamical coupling of troposphere and stratosphere to make accurate weather and climate predictions is well-known. Over the past years and decades various signatures of such a
coupling have been discovered. A very robust result, for example, seems to be an equatorward shift of the tropospheric eddy driven jet following sudden stratospheric warming events, where the westerly winds of the stratospheric polar vortex weaken or even reverse. However, many aspects of this fundamental coupling are still not fully understood and research on how the state of the stratosphere can influence the tropospheric circulation and what dynamical processes are involved is still ongoing.

An important such process arises due to the interaction of a sharp, localised maximum in potential vorticity gradient near the tropopause with baroclinic eddies in the troposphere. Here, we analyse the sensitivity of baroclinic wave development and evolution to changes of various basic state characteristics, by performing a series of idealised baroclinic eddy life cycle experiments. Special attention is paid to sensitivities associated with the dynamical state of the stratosphere. We find that the final (steady) state of the life cycle simulations corresponds to an equatorward shift of the tropospheric jet in cases where the initial conditions do not include a stratospheric polar vortex (such as following sudden warming events) compared to those that do. These results further support the idea that the stratospheric state can strongly influence tropospheric dynamics and, in particular, highlight the robustness of the jet shift response following sudden warmings, that can be seen in a range of observations and numerical model experiments.