| Term: | mesoscale |
| Definition: |
Pertaining to atmospheric phenomena having horizontal scales ranging from a few to several hundred kilometers, including thunderstorms, sordil lines, fronts, precipitation bands in tropical and extratropical cyclones, and topographically generated weather systems such as mountain waves and sea and land breezes. From a dynamical perspective, this term pertains to processes with timescales ranging from the inverse of the Brunt?V?is?l? frequency to a pendulum day, encompassing deep moist convection and the full spectrum of inertio-gravity waves but stopping short of synoptic-scale phenomena, which have Rossby numbers less than 1. |