Identification

Title

On the dynamics of the East African Jet. I. Simulation of mean conditions for July

Abstract

The East African jet, also popularly called the Somali jet, is viewed as a western boundary current of the East African highlands. Inertial and Coriolis forces. bottom friction and orography are believed important in the jet dynamics. A barotropic, primitive equation model on an equatorial beta plane is used to test this hypothesis. The flow is driven by a mass source term representing the subsidence in the southern branch of the monsoon Hadley cell. Steady, zonally symmetric solutions indicate that the combination of inertial forces, surface friction and weak subsidence can provide an adequate description of the southeast trades over the South Indian Ocean. It is deduced that, in order for the easterly flow to change into westerlies south of the equator, convergence of the flow must occur at the transition latitude, and the meridional mass flux must vanish. A two-dimensional numerical model successfully simulates most of the major large-scale features of the climatological low-level flow over the South Indian Ocean and cast coast of Africa during the northern summer. It is shown that while the broad outer flank of the jet is inertially controlled, with bottom friction playing a secondary role, the narrow inner flank is the result of orographically enhanced bottom friction. The mountain backbone of Madagascar is demonstrated to be essential to the development of a relative wind speed maximum at the northern tip of the island and of an upstream ridge-downstream trough pressure distribution over the island. The sensitivity of the model jet to variations in the upstream forcing and in the friction parameterization is also examined.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7pk0h9f

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

1979-11-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright 1979 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact