Identifying individual atmospheric equatorial waves from a total flow field

Owing to the opposite vertical orientation with respect to the plane of Earth’s rotation across the equator from the Southern Hemisphere to Northern Hemisphere, the equator serves as a waveguide that houses all kinds of atmospheric waves propagating along the west-east direction, which are referred to as “equatorial waves.” Equatorial waves are generated from spatially non-uniform diabatic heating fields, including latent heating releases from convective storms. These equatorial waves in turn initiate and organize new convections as they propagate out of their genesis locations, triggering a new set of equatorial waves propagating both eastwards and westwards along the equator. As a result, equatorial waves play important roles in organizing large-scale circulation disturbances and regulating large-scale diabatic heating patterns in tropics.