The Band Structure of the Atmosphere

Abstract

A general characteristic of the atmosphere is its streakiness. It manifests itself in many phenomena such as the “cloudstreets” of polar outbreaks and tradewinds, the radar bands of hurricanes and certain precipitation patterns, the squall lines and the jet stream cirrus.

The banded structure can be traced back to convection in heated air flows with a curved velocity profile of rather uniform direction. The typical vertical curvature was found to be 10−7 (cm−1 sec−1). A preliminary note deals with some theoretical considerations.

Synoptic cloud analysis by weather satellites will greatly profit from the wide spread existence of cloud bands.