EVOLUTION OF LARGE SCALE DISTURBANCES AND THEIR INTERACTION WITH MEAN FLOW IN A ROTATING BAROTROPIC ATMOSPHERE —PART I

The problems on evolution of large-scale disturbances and their interaction with mean flow recently attract much effort of meteorologists due to their practical importance in weather and climate predictions. In this paper, some theoretical results obtained in current investigations of these problems will be reviewed. A barotropic atmosphere is taken in this paper, and the baroclinic atmosphere is left in our second paper.The following aspects are reviewed: First, the general properties of two-dimensional barotropic motion both in the nonlinear and linearized equations and both in the quasi-geostrophic and non-geostrophic models. Second, the evolution and the structure of Rossby wave packet superimposed on a zonal or non-zonal basic flow.In this part, only the above two problems are reviewed. The rernanent problems, i.e., the normal modes and continuous spectra of both quasi-geostrophic and non-geostrophic models, weakly nonlinear theory and the fully nonlinear theory will be discussed in part II (another paper).