Abstract
PEKERIS1 showed that in a long-period oscillation of the earth's atmosphere the divergence of the velocity vector satisfied a second-order differential equation, and that at high level (where he assumed for simplicity that the air temperature was constant) the two solutions of this equation were proportional to exp [iσt + (½± iµ)x] ; x is the height measured in terms of the scale height, and µ is a (real or imaginary) quantity depending on the temperature of the atmosphere. The velocity components are proportional to the same expression. The static air pressure, p0, is proportional to exp —(x).
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References
Pekeris, Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 158, 650 (1937).
Weekes and Wilkes, Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 192, 80 (1947).
Kirchhoff, Pogg. Ann., 134, 177 (1868). See Lamb, “Hydrodynamics’ (Cambridge University Press, 1932, 6th ed., p. 648).
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WILKES, M. Atmospheric Oscillations. Nature 164, 281 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/164281a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/164281a0
