BLOCKING TRACKING

Potential vorticity dynamics

In order to understand more of the dynamics of atmospheric blocking it can be helpful to track features that are prominently visible in mature blocks. One of these are large-scale negative potential vorticity (PV) anomalies. In the animation I have used a tracking algorithm to follow negative PV anomalies (shading). The coloring of the contours indicates whether sufficient thresholds for amplitude, size and persistence have been exceeded.