The dynamics of error growth in a quasigeostrophic channel model

The objective of the paper is to determine the extent to which baroclinic instability contributes to the growth of errors in simple, yet realistic models of atmospheric flow. The model used here is a two-level quasi-geostrophic channel model. Results of two predictability experiments are reported. In one experiment, the initial condition perturbation was confined to the highest wavenumbers and had an energy of 1 percent of the climatological energy of the model for these scales. In the other experiment, perturbations were put only in the planetary wave and had the same strength relative to climatology as in the first experiment, leading to much larger absolute errors.