Understanding and Portraying the Global Atmospheric Circulation

Abstract

Atmospheric circulation and resultant surface pressure patterns are important discussion topics in many introductory geography, meteorology, and earth science courses. In the past, summary materials developed to aid in teaching these concepts have used a north-south oriented meridional cross-section of the troposphere (e.g., the three-cell model). We suggest that while the Hadley Cell model works well for the tropics, an alternative depiction incorporating two map views should be used to present a more meaningful view of the mean extratrop-ical circulation. The combination of a tropical cross-section map and an extra-tropical map will assist students in learning about first-order motions associated with the Earth's atmospheric circulation.

Key Words:

• extratropical atmospheric circulation
• Rossby waves
• surface pressure cells