The Antarctic Polar Vortex
We study the flow near the Antarctic polar vortex via dynamical systems
methods. The meandering jet configuration of the flow suggests that
a chaotic advection mechanism may be at work. However, the finite-time
nature of the system and the flow complexity make it difficult to apply
the previously developed theory directly. We appeal to recent results
on finite-time flows of Miller
et al., Rogerson et al., and Haller
and Poje
to study this flow. The motivation for this work, as well as
a technique to approach the difficulties posed by the problem, is due to
Bowman.