The Atmospheric General Circulation

John M. Wallace is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences of the University of Washington. He served as Department Chair from 1983–1988. He is a recipient of the James B. Macelwane and Roger Revelle Medals of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award and Carl-Gustav Rossby Medal of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). He is a Fellow of the AGU and the AMS, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the co-author (with Peter Hobbs) of Atmospheric Sciences: An Introductory Survey (2006), one of the most influential textbooks in the field. David S. Battisti is Professor and Tamaki Chair of Atmospheric Sciences in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. He is a recipient of the Carl-Gustav Rossby Research Medal of the AMS and was a Carnegie Centennial Professor of Scotland from 2014-16. He is a Fellow of the AGU and the AMS, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a co-editor of the journal Weather and Climate Dynamics. David W. J. Thompson is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University and the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. He is a recipient of the Clarence B. Meisinger Award of the AMS, the James B. Macelwane Medal and the Jule G. Charney Lectureship of the AGU, the Royal Society (UK) Wolfson Fellowship, and the Monfort Professorship at Colorado State University. He is a Fellow of the AGU. Dennis Hartmann is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. He served as Department Chair from 2002–07. He is a recipient of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Carl Gustav Rossby Research Medal of the AMS, and the Revelle Medal of the AGU. He is a Fellow of the AGU and the AMS, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the textbook Global Physical Climatology (2006).

Part I. Background: 1. Observations and Models; 2. Heuristic models of the general circulation; Part II. Balance Requirements for the General Circulation; 3. The angular momentum balance; 4. Mass balance of atmospheric trace constituents; 5. The balance of total energy; 6. The mechanical energy cycle; Part III. Dynamics of the Zonal Mean Flow: 7. Dynamics of the zonal mean flow; 8. Wave-mean-flow interaction; Part IV. The Stratospheric General Circulation; 9. The global circulation of the stratosphere; 10. Wave-mean flow interaction in the tropical stratosphere; Part V. The Zonally Varying Extratropical Tropospheric Circulation; 11. The boreal winter zonally-varying climatology; 12. The high frequency extratropical transients; 13. Low-frequency extratropical transients; Part VI. The Tropical General Circulation; 14. The annual mean circulation of the tropics; 15. Deep convection; 16. The seasons in the tropics; 17. El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO); 18. Intraseasonal variability of the tropical general circulation; 19. Higher frequency tropical weather systems; 20. Warm core tropical vortices; 21. Diurnal and higher frequency variability of the global circulation; Appendix A. Space and time averaging operations; Appendix B. The zonal momentum balance; Appendix C. Methods of identifying teleconnection patterns; Appendix D. Scaling and application of the Weak Temperature Gradient Approximation; Appendix E. Math symbols and abbreviations; Appendix F. Extended figure captions; Appendix G. Exercise answers.