zaplotnik/Metrics-of-Hadley-circulation-strength

Hadley cell strength

This is a collection of open data sources related to the study of the sensitivity of the trend of Hadley cell (HC) strength to the applied HC strength measure. The applied metrics are described in manuscript: Pikovnik, Zaplotnik, Boljka, Žagar, 2021. Metrics of the Hadley circulation strength and associated circulation trends (under review at EGU Weather and Climate Dynamics).

The HC strength is commonly evaluated by metrics derived from the mass-weighted zonal-mean stream function in isobaric coordinates. Other metrics include the velocity potential and the vertical velocity. These metrics of the HC strength are here complemented by a measure of the average HC strength, obtained by averaging the stream function in the latitude-pressure ($\varphi$-$p$) plane, and by the total energy of unbalanced zonal-mean circulation in the normal-mode function decomposition. The two new measures alleviate the vertical and meridional inhomogeneities of the trends in the HC strength.

The data is organised into the following folder:

HC_strength_timeseries

HC_strength_normalized_timeseries: timeseries normalized by the climatological mean value

HC_strength_psi_trends: trends of stream-function-based metrics

HC_strength_relative_trends: trends of normalized timeseries

HC_strength_maxmin_pressure_levels: pressure levels of maximum and minimum values in the annual-mean streamfunction fields

animation: animation of the changes of annual-mean, january and july Hadley cell, desribed by the zonal-mean streamfunction in the latitude-pressure plane

correlations_AHC: correlation of the average HC strength measure with other streamfunction based measures; for Northern Hadley cell (NHC) and Southern Hadley cell (SHC)