Poleward heat transport in the midlatitudes happens primarily
though atmospheric eddies. Understanding this transport is complicated
by two aspects; firstly the eddies are not permament features, which
means that care needs to be taken when averaging, and secondly the eddy
transport is associated with large amounts of latent heating that needs
to be accounted for. In this presentation I will look at 3 different
ways to understand the heat transport created by the eddies and the
influence of latent heating.
The first perspective will use potential temperature and equivalent
potential temperature to track surface anomalies into the polar
mid-troposphere. The second perspective will use mass fluxes projected
into an equivalent potential temperature phase space to understand the
distribution of mass fluxes, and the third perspective will look at
using a tracer framework to explicitly track heat produced by latent
heating. By presenting these 3 perspectives together I hope to help
develop intuition about the processes which create and transport heat
poleward.