Dominant transport pathways in an atmospheric blocking event

TL;DR

This paper constructs a Lagrangian flow network to analyze atmospheric blocking in Eastern Europe and Western Russia, revealing dominant transport pathways and the structure of the Omega-block during summer 2010.

Contribution

It introduces a hierarchy of highly probable transport paths, providing a detailed description of atmospheric transport even when the most probable path is not dominant.

Findings

Identified the Omega-block skeleton using most probable paths.

Developed a hierarchy of path sets to describe transport.

Revealed the geometry of transport pathways in blocking events.

Abstract

A Lagrangian flow network is constructed for the atmospheric blocking of eastern Europe and western Russia in summer 2010. We compute the most probable paths followed by fluid particles which reveal the {\it Omega}-block skeleton of the event. A hierarchy of sets of highly probable paths is introduced to describe transport pathways when the most probable path alone is not representative enough. These sets of paths have the shape of narrow coherent tubes flowing close to the most probable one. Thus, even when the most probable path is not very significant in terms of its probability, it still identifies the geometry of the transport pathways.