Intraseasonal Variations of the British–Baikal Corridor Pattern

The British–Baikal Corridor (BBC) pattern is the dominant waveguide mode trapped along the summertime polar front jet over northern Eurasia. It consists of four geographically fixed centers over the west of the British Isles, the Baltic Sea, western Siberia, and Lake Baikal, respectively. Its intraseasonal variations and dynamics are investigated based on reanalysis datasets. The BBC pattern has a life cycle of about two weeks. Its precursor could be traced back to an upstream wave packet propagating along the Atlantic jet 10 days before its peak, and its life cycle resembles the evolution of a quasi-stationary Rossby wave train. Diagnosis of the streamfunction tendency equation suggests that the growth and decay of the BBC pattern are primarily driven by the nonlinear processes, whereas the quasi-stationary feature of the BBC pattern arises from the cancellation among the linear processes. Energetics analysis indicates that the energy cycle with the transient eddies (TEs) plays an essential role in the growth and decay of the BBC pattern. The BBC pattern first feeds on the barotropic energy provided by the TEs and then returns the energy to TEs in the form of baroclinic energy. It is this nonlinear interaction with the TEs that poses a tough challenge to the current state-of-the-art models to capture the BBC pattern reasonably.