An objective climatology of mobile troughs in the Northern Hemisphere

This paper introduces a technique to identify and track tropospheric mobile troughs. Mobile troughs are objectively identified as maxima in the transport of geostrophic curvature vorticity. A 20-year climatology of mobile trough genesis and termination regions is constructed by applying the method to National Meteorological Center 500 mb geopotential height data. The objective tracking results are compared to Sanders' (1988) climatology of mobile troughs on the 552 dam contour. The objective method was shown to be more consistent and accurate than Sanders' subjective method, and therefore, determined to be superior in tracking mid-tropospheric mobile troughs. -from Authors

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