Extracting envelopes of Rossby wave packets

Packets of Rossby waves play an important role in the transfer of kinetic energy in the extratropics. The ability to locate, track, and detect changes in the envelope of these wave packets is vital to detecting baroclinic downstream development, tracking the impact of the analysis errors in numerical weather forecasts, and analyzing the forecast effects of targeted weather observations. In this note, it is argued that a well-known technique of digital signal processing, which is based on the Hilbert transform, should be used for extracting the envelope of atmospheric wave packets. This technique is robust, simple, and computationally inexpensive. The superiority of the proposed algorithm over the complex demodulation technique (the only technique previously used for this purpose in atmospheric studies) is demonstrated by examples. The skill of the proposed algorithm is also demonstrated by tracking wave packets in operational weather analyses from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and analyzing the effects of targeted observations from the 2000 Winter Storm Reconnaissance (WSR00) field program.