Front, warm conveyor belt, atmospheric river, tropical moisture exports and flexible tubes.
Front, warm conveyor belt, atmospheric river, tropical moisture exports and flexible tubes. These are just some of the terms used throughout the scientific literature to describe big, long, wet things in the atmosphere. But are these phrases describing different phenomenon or are they merely alternative names for the same system?
ORIGINS OF CONCEPTUAL MODELS OF EXTRATROPICAL CYCLONES
It has been just over 100 years since Bjerknes’ seminal 1919 paper On the Structure of Moving Cyclones was published. As the satellite era would not begin for another 60 years, scientists used the extensive European telegraph network to attain observations of air pressure, temperature and wind to understand and track the evolution of extratropical cyclones across the continent.
Following World War II and the rapid development of aircraft technology, upper atmospheric observations became available for meteorologists. This allowed for a better understanding of the vertical motion within an extratropical cyclone, and in 1971 Browning introduced the term Warm Conveyor Belt.
The Warm Conveyor Belt is a narrow, quasi-continuous ascent of planetary boundary layer moisture from the warm sector over a warm front in an extratropical cyclone. The warm conveyor belt is illustrated by the light blue lines in the above image. Warm Conveyor Belts are the main region of cloud formation and precipitation in an extratropical cyclone.
Read more at ARC Centre of Excellence
Photo Credit: WikiImages via Pixabay
