Wintertime Stratospheric Anomalies-Part I: Warm Pools

The stratospheric worm pools, called the 4-day wave also, are mainly the temperature anomalies in the polar re-gions of winter hemisphere. It will be shown that their occurrence, propagation speed and specific structure can be explained by the lower frequency coherent heating resulting from the wave interaction in the breaking layers of the stratosphere. Although their vertical phase slope is negligibly small, the warm pools cannot be considered as a barotropic anomaly.