Assessing Lagrangian coherence in atmospheric blocking

Atmospheric blocking exerts a major influence on mid-latitude atmospheric circulation and is known to be associated with extreme weather events. Previous work has highlighted the importance of the origin of air parcels that define the blocking region, especially with respect to non-adiabatic processes such as latent heating. So far, an objective method of clustering the individual Lagrangian trajectories passing through a blocking into larger and, more importantly, spatially coherent air streams has not been established. This is the focus of our study.

To this end, we determine coherent sets of trajectories, which are regions in the phase space of dynamical systems that keep their geometric integrity in time and can be characterized by robustness under small random perturbations. We approximate a dynamic diffusion operator on the available Lagrangian data and use it to cluster the trajectories into coherent sets. Our implementation adapts the existing methodology to the non-Euclidean geometry of Earth's atmosphere and its challenging scaling properties. The framework also allows for statements about the spatial behavior of the trajectories as a whole. We discuss two case studies differing with respect to season and geographic location.

The results confirm the existence of spatially coherent feeder air streams differing with respect to their dynamical properties and, more specifically, their latent heating contribution. Air streams experiencing a considerable amount of latent heating (warm conveyor belts) occur mainly during the maturing phase of the blocking and contribute to its stability. In our example cases, trajectories also exhibit an altered evolution of general coherence when passing through the blocking region, which is in line with the common understanding of blocking as a region of low dispersion.