Abstract
Motivated by the expectation that under global warming upper-level meridional temperature gradients will increase while lower-level temperature gradients will decrease, the relations between the vertical structure of baroclinicity and eddy fields are investigated. The sensitivity of eddies and the relation between the mean available potential energy and eddy quantities are studied for cases where the vertical structure of the lapse rate and meridional temperature gradient are modified. To investigate this systematically, an idealized general circulation model with a Newtonian cooling scheme that has a very short relaxation time for the mean state and a long relaxation time for eddies is used. This scheme allows for any chosen zonally mean state to be obtained with good precision. The results indicate that for similar change in the lapse rate or meridional temperature gradient, eddies are more sensitive to changes in baroclinicity where it is already large. Furthermore, when the vertical structure of the lapse rate or the meridional temperature gradient is modified, there is no universal linear relation between the mean available potential energy and eddy quantities.
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