Vertical structure of wintertime teleconnection patterns.

Abstract

Orthogonal rotated principal component analysis of the wintertime, Northern Hemisphere, 5-day mean sea level pressure field yielded five modes which are of some dynamical interest. One can be identified with the well-known North Atlantic Oscillation and another with the Pacific/North American pattern. Three of the other modes are highly baroclinic in the sense that their sea level pressure patterns and their associated 500 mb height patterns are different in shape and opposite in polarity over substantial areas. -from Authors