Northern winter stationary waves: Theory and modeling

A review is provided of stationary wave theory, the theory for the deviations from zonal symmetry of the climate. To help focus the discussion the authors concentrate exclusively on northern winter. Several theoretical issues, including the external Rossby wave dispersion relation and vertical structure, critical latitude absorption, the nonlinear response to orography, and the interaction of forced wave trains with preexisting zonal asymmetries, are chosen for discussion while simultaneously presenting a decomposition of the wintertime stationary wave field using a nonlinear steady-state model.