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Horizontal structure of the fastest Rossby mode on the sphere, n=1 Rossby wave.
Geopotential height is scaled by the maximal height. Colours vary between -1 and +1 with positive/negative perturbations in red/blue.
Wind components are scaled by the maximal wind speed. The equivalent depth is 1536 meters.
The n=1 Rossby wave, together with the Kelvin wave, provides basic understanding of large-scale circulation in response to tropical heating perturbations, following Gill (1980) and the long-wave approximation.