Is a Real Cyclogenesis Case Explained by Generalized Linear Baroclinic Instability

Abstract Midlatitude cyclogenesis is currently often explained as resulting from the baroclinic instability of a jet flow. The present formulation of the theory, essentially resulting from the deep revision performed by Farrell, associates incipient cyclones with amplifying singular vectors of a linear propagator operator obtained by linearizing the relevant model equations (balanced or not) about a trajectory representing the jet flow alone. A major difficulty for transposing the theoretical framework to a real case, and then opening the way to quantitative verifications of the theory, is this separation of an actual realization of cyclogenesis into the cyclone as a perturbation on one side and its environment on the other. A methodology to obtain such a separation in a reasonably objective and dynamically consistent way is presented. It enables obtaining two diabatic primitive equation solutions about the 26 December 1999 intense storm, one that has the event and the other that has most of the character...

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