ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical survey of statistics obtained by several investigators for the large-scale generation, dissipation, and conversion of energy in the atmosphere. In the space domain mean kinetic energy is defined as the kinetic energy of the zonally averaged motion, in the time domain it is defined as the kinetic energy of the time-mean motion, and in the mixed space-time domain as the kinetic energy of the time-mean and zonal-mean motion. At low latitudes the earth–atmosphere system gains more energy per unit area by the absorption of short-wave radiation from the sun than it loses to space by the emission of long-wave radiation; the reverse is true at high latitudes. A comparison of the energy integrals calculated in the numerical experiments with those calculated from actual data shows that the dissipation of eddy kinetic energy in the experiments is too small, while the dissipation of mean kinetic energy is much too large.
