My dissertation focuses on atmospheric angular momentum and large-scale climate dynamics. I'll add more about each part as the research becomes publicly available.
Part 1 · Manuscript under review
This study examines the global atmospheric angular momentum budget in ERA5, including the torques that exchange momentum with Earth and how budget closure varies across timescales.
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Part 3
Atmospheric angular momentum (AAM) describes how Earth’s atmosphere contributes to planetary rotation. It integrates the effects of atmospheric mass and winds into a single quantity, making it a powerful diagnostic of the global circulation and its variability.
AAM represents the structure of the general circulation, with distinct tropical and midlatitude contributions shaped by prevailing winds. While the mass of the atmosphere sets the long-term mean, variability in AAM is dominated by changes in zonal winds. As a result, AAM fluctuates across a wide range of timescales, from synoptic weather systems to seasonal, interannual, and decadal climate variability.
Changes in AAM occur through torques that exchange momentum between the atmosphere, Earth’s surface, and the upper atmosphere. Surface friction, flow over topography, and gravity wave processes act together to accelerate or decelerate the atmospheric circulation, linking weather systems, topography, and large-scale dynamics.
The AAM budget relates changes in AAM to the sum of the torques (friction, mountain, and gravity wave drag). This framework provides a physically consistent way to diagnose how momentum is redistributed within the climate system and how different processes dominate at different timescales.
An updated overview of AAM climatology, budget, and applications may be found in Gensini et al. 2025 (see Publications)