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Observations and Modelling of Fronts and Frontogenesis

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vorticity was always greater than or equal to the actual<br />

layer depth h3. Thus, h3 could be calculated everywhere from<br />

conservation <strong>of</strong> potential vorticity, <strong>and</strong> then replaced with<br />

H - h1 in that region where the initial estimate yielded<br />

h1 + h3 > H. The point y was taken to be the farthest<br />

<strong>of</strong>fshore point where this replacement was made. It proved<br />

useful to place a lower bound <strong>of</strong> lO on nonzero values <strong>of</strong> h2<br />

<strong>and</strong> to require 1v21 < 5 where h2 < io2. This has no<br />

significant dynamical effects but substantially improves<br />

numerical stability.<br />

A fourth-order Runge-Kutta time-stepping scheme was<br />

used. Convergence was tested by halving the time step on a<br />

subset <strong>of</strong> the numerical integrations. Computations were<br />

carried out on the Cray lA at NCAR. Much <strong>of</strong> the code was<br />

vectorized. A typical integration required several minutes<br />

<strong>of</strong> CPU time.<br />

91

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