Rossby, Carl Gustav

Swedish scientists Carl Gustav Rossby and Erik Eriksson help to expand Egner s... 

The gravity waves just described occur at high frequencies and small scales. For motions with intrinsic periods greater than a day, and horizontal scales of the order of 1000 km or larger, a distinct type of wave motion appears, the Rossby wave (named after Carl Gustav Rossby, who first pointed out their meteorological importance in the 1930s). The Rossby wave owes its existence to the variation of the Coriolis parameter, /, with latitude. 

Table I shows the spatial and temporal scales of motion associated with various meteorological phenomena. Large-scale motions, such as planetary waves, were discovered from upper-air observations dining World War II. The work of Jacob Bjerknes (1897-1975), Carl-Gustav Rossby (1898-1957), and others led to the important discoveries that (1) planetary-scale waves are clearly related to weather systems, and (2) planetary-scale waves are predominantly horizontal and in quasi-geostrophic balance, as explained later.

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