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A stochastic differential equation framework for gravity wave parametrisation with testing in an idealised setting

Xie, K; Ewetola, M; Esler, JG; (2025) A stochastic differential equation framework for gravity wave parametrisation with testing in an idealised setting. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society , Article e4983. 10.1002/qj.4983. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Parametrisations of unresolved gravity waves used in general circulation models can be made more computationally efficient by introducing a stochastic component to the forcing. An additional advantage of introducing stochasticity is that intermittency associated with the scheme could be tuned to resemble the intermittency of observed gravity wave sources, and could therefore act to improve the physical fidelity of the scheme. Here, it is argued that using stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to drive the stochastic component provides a natural general framework to develop such schemes. The Holton–Lindzen–Plumb model of the quasi‐biennial oscillation (QBO) is used to demonstrate the flexibility of the approach. The QBO generated in a (computationally expensive) deterministic broadband multiwave simulation is accurately reproduced using a number of quite different (cheap) stochastic schemes. The method of stochastic averaging is used to prove a matching result that shows that a wide class of such schemes, driven by different SDEs, can each reproduce the deterministic QBO provided that the characteristic time‐scale of the SDEs is sufficiently short. However, each scheme has different intermittency properties: as is increased, their QBOs are shown to diverge, despite the time‐averaged source spectrum in each case remaining unchanged. The SDE framework therefore provides great flexibility to tune a stochastic parametrisation to match observed intermittencies, meaning that future parametrisations can be developed that can account for non‐steady gravity wave forcing in a physically consistent manner.

Type: Article
Title: A stochastic differential equation framework for gravity wave parametrisation with testing in an idealised setting
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1002/qj.4983
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.4983
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Meteorological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: gravity waves, parametrisation, stochastic differential equations
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Mathematics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10208067
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