Abstract
Based on daily observations from about 1000 rawinsonde stations, tables and global distributions of the various water vapour fields are presented for mean annual, winter and summer conditions covering the 10-year period, May 1963 through April 1973. The fields include horizontal maps of precipitable water, of total zonal, meridional and vertical transports by eddy and mean circulations, as well as meridional profiles and zonal mean cross-sections of these quantities.
The connections between the atmospheric branch and the hydrology of the Earth’s surface were studied with the aid of the divergence fields of mean total water vapour flux and through horizontal and vertical streamfunction analyses. The divergence maps agree quite well with maps of evaporation minus precipitation (E-P) obtained from classic, climatological surface data. Over the oceans, the divergence fields show a good correlation with the evaporation and surface salinity maps.
From the zonal mean streamfunction analyses, the total vertical transports of water substance were inferred, and compared with the contributions by standing eddies and mean meridional circulations. The resulting vertical fluxes by transient eddies show the great importance of cumulus convection in the tropics for the atmospheric circulation. The main sources and sinks of atmospheric water vapour, as well as the dominant mean trajectories of water, are identified.
In the light of various climatological and oceanographic considerations, the results show that the study of the atmospheric branch is essential to improve understanding of the Earth’s water balance on both regional and global scales.
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© 1983 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Peixóto, J.P., Oort, A.H. (1983). The Atmospheric Branch Of The Hydrological Cycle And Climate. In: Street-Perrott, A., Beran, M., Ratcliffe, R. (eds) Variations in the Global Water Budget. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6954-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6954-4_2
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