Ross Marsden
Senior Member.
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From; http://www.physics.uwo.ca/~whocking/p103/grav_wav.htmlExternal Quote:Importance of Gravity Waves
Even only fifteen years ago, many scientists regarded gravity waves as simply idle curiosities. Many people considered that they had no real impact on atmospheric motions at any sort of important scale.This attitude has now changed.
Gravity waves carry momentum and energy between different points in the atmosphere. If a gravity wave is generated at a source region (e.g. a mountain) and dissipates somewhere else, this amounts to a transfer of energy and momentum from the first point to the second. When energy and momentum are deposited in the dissipation region, they can alter the mean flow. Meteorologists have realized in the last decade that computer models are not always very good at predicting mean winds, or making good forecasts, and they have now realized that part of the reason for this is that they had not been including gravity wave generation and dissipation in their models. A considerable amount of effort is being turned towards proper parametrization of gravity waves in meteorological models.
In the upper regions of the atmosphere, especially the stratosphere and mesosphere, gravity waves have huge effects. For example, in the mesosphere it has been found that by including gravity waves in computer models, the directions of the winds have in some cases even been reversed relative to the expected wind directions deduced without inclusion of gravity waves! The values deduced with gravity waves included agree better with observations than do the older predictions.
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Bryan
You have quoted those paragraphs (emphasis here is mine) several times as if they are really, really, really important for the claim you are making.
They are more about the importance of including gravity wave processes in numerical weather prediction (computer models) to get better results, than about the importance of gravity waves per se.
