Wave-activity conservation laws play an fundamental role in our understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere. In particular the pseudomomentum wave-activity conservation law, which describes the generation and dissipation of eddy pseudomomentum flux, is central to theoretical analysis in the extratropics. In this talk we will show how wave-activity conservation laws can be used to understand the transfer of energy and momentum between the resolved scales and subgrid-scales in a climate model. We will subsequently focus on a particular subgrid-scale application, which is the transfer of momentum in organized convection. Using output from a cloud-resolving model we will show how the pseudomomentum wave-activity conservation law can be used to understand the transfers of momentum, which involve both convective momentum transport and gravity waves.
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