Potential Vorticity Diagnosis of the Severe Convective Regime. Part II: The Impact of Idealized PV Anomalies

Abstract

Idealized numerical experiments are conducted to understand the effect of upper-tropospheric potential vorticity (PV) anomalies on an environment conducive to severe weather. Anomalies are specified as a single isolated vortex, a string of vortices analogous to a negatively tilted trough, and a pair of string vortices analogous to a position error in a negatively tilted trough. The anomalies are placed adjacent to the tropopause along a strong upper-level jet at a time just prior to a major tornado outbreak and inverted using the nonlinear balance equations.

In addition to the expected destabilization beneath and adjacent to a cyclonic PV anomaly, the spatial pattern of the inverted balanced streamfunction and height fields is distorted by the presence of the horizontal PV gradient along the upper-tropospheric jet stream. Streamfunction anomalies are elongated in the cross-jet direction, while height and temperature anomalies are elongated in the along-jet direction. The amplitude of the inverted fields, as well as the changes in CAPE associated with the inverted temperature perturbations, are linearly proportional to the amplitudes of the PV anomalies themselves, and the responses to complex PV perturbation structures are approximated by the sum of the responses to individual simple PV anomalies. This is true for the range of PV amplitudes tested, which was designed to mimic typical 6-h forecast or analysis errors and produced changes in CAPE beneath the trough of well over 100 J kg−1. Impacts on inverted fields are largest when the PV anomaly is on the anticyclonic shear side of the jet, where background PV is small, compared with the cyclonic shear side of the jet, where background PV is large.