20.01.2021: Brian Hoskins - "Potential Vorticity"

The development the concepts of potential vorticity (PV) and quasi-geostrophic PV, and their use by largely separate academic communities will be traced. In my work on frontogenesis in about 1970, I was able to bring them together in the context of simple situations with uniform PV, and this was later generalised in semi-geostrophic theory. With the availability of good quality global analyses from forecast centres, dynamical ideas were immediately applicable to the understanding of weather developments, and our 1985 paper on Isentropic PV Maps was written to advertise this. In the subsequent 35 years, these maps and those for potential temperature on a PV2 tropopause have become a general resource. I am now using them to gain insight into tropical weather and climate. https://sites.google.com/view/perspec...