New Approach to Study the Evolution of Rossby Wave Packet

The average variational principle was employed in this paper to study the evolution of large-scale and slowly va-rying Rossby wave packet with basic flow both in barotropic and baroclinic atmospheres. The evolution of the struc-ture of Rossby wave packet with both time and space was studied. The results obtained in this paper are similar to the results of by WKBJ method. In addition, the dispersive process of the wave packet was analysed by taking Gaussian type wave packet as an initial disturbance. The valid time scale for application of wave packet theory in the atmos-phere was obtained.