AGU Chapman Conference on Atmospheric Gravity Waves and Their Effects On General Circulation and Climate, February 28 – March 4, 2011, Honolulu Hawaii

Conference Overview and Objectives

Gravity waves are a dominant mode of variability in the atmosphere at scales near the resolution of current climate model simulations. They are generated by a variety of processes including the interaction of surface winds with topography, deep convective storms, and unbalanced flow in the jet stream. Circulation changes associated with gravity wave dissipation are now known to have wide-ranging effects on numerical weather predictions, climate change response patterns, forecasts of stratospheric ozone recovery, and space weather. The global scale of these issues requires global knowledge of gravity wave properties despite the fact that the scales of the waves themselves are too small to be fully simulated in a global model or fully sampled in global observations. The problem of gravity waves and their effects on the general circulation thus requires a broad range of studies, those using local high-resolution observations, limited-area wave-resolving models, global models, and global observational data sets such as those acquired from satellite.

Although the problem of gravity wave effects on the circulation and climate is a focused one, the solutions require collaborations among researchers with a wide range of expertise and research methods. Recent advances in the resolution of both satellite observations and global models have resulted in a surge of interest in this topic. This Chapman Conference will provide a chance for this community to come together to focus on gravity waves and their effects, to assimilate recent results, and to stimulate new research crossing traditional boundaries of weather and climate, upper and lower atmosphere, global and mesoscale processes, and chemical and dynamical processes.

Conference Findings

The conference was attended by 92 scientific researchers and students fro 12 countries. Gravity waves represent an important component of atmospheric variability over a broad spectrum. The spectral range of significant gravity wave power in the real atmosphere stretches across the typical truncation scale in contemporary global simulation models, making both the explicit representation of gravity waves and the parameterization of sub-grid scale wave effects both necessary and potentially problematic.  Gravity waves are generated by a variety of processes including the interaction of surface winds with topography, deep convective storms, and unbalanced flow in the jet stream, and these waves act to transport mean momentum between the surface and atmosphere and between different layers of the atmosphere. As the waves dissipate, convergence of their momentum flux is known to drive important circulation changes at altitudes ranging from the upper troposphere and stratosphere into the mesosphere, thermosphere and ionosphere. These circulation changes are now known to have wide-ranging effects in numerical weather prediction, climate change response patterns, forecasts of stratospheric ozone recovery, and space weather and radio communication. The global scale of these issues requires global knowledge of gravity wave properties despite the fact that the scales of the waves themselves are too small to be fully simulated in a global model or fully sampled in global observations. The problem of gravity waves and their effects on the general circulation thus requires a broad range of studies, those using local high-resolution observations, limited-area wave- resolving models, global models, and global observational data sets such as those acquired from satellite.

S