meridional anomaly

[AntonioLao]

Wherever and whenever the atmospheric circulations are dominated by the southerly northerly components of motion it can be called a meridional anomaly. These circulations always seem to lie in a vertical plane oriented along any meridian. Meridional flows can be applied to everywhere on earth. However, its effects seem to diminish at both poles. Since the geographic poles is not located at the same places as the geomagnetic poles, the physics of meridional anomaly presents almost unsurpassable engineering challenges. Combined with zonal anomaly, the phenomenon becomes a complex dynamic system properly studied by the nonlinear physics of chaos theory. However, optimistically speaking, one can believe that order can emerge out of chaos as what Ilya Prigogine wrote in a popularized book he published in 1984 seven years after he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977.

The physics of meridional anomaly is somehow connected to changes in global temperature gradient. Minimums can always be found at both poles while maximums are almost always found near the equatorial parallels. Since hot air rises and cold sinks, air motion always starts from higher temperatures and ends at lower temperatures. However, the dynamics of temperature variation seems to provide continuous ceaseless movements of hot air and cold air everywhere and everywhen around the globe. Nonetheless, a dynamic equilibrium between zonal and meridional anomalies can create isolated regions of no air flows.

[labelwench]

The Doldrums, also called the "equatorial calms", are the calms and light baffling winds at the intertropical convergence zone. The zone is a band, encircling the Earth just north of the equator, where the winds from the northern and southern hemispheres come together.

The Doldrums affect areas of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean that are within the zone. The prevailing winds there are calm; and the atmospheric pressure is low, because of the heat at the equator, which makes the air rise and travel north and south high in the atmosphere, until it subsides again in the horse latitudes. Some of that air returns to the Doldrums through the trade winds. This process can cause light winds; variable winds; and more severe weather, in the form of heavy squalls, thunderstorms, and hurricanes.

The Doldrums—the region's light, shifting, and sometimes completely absent winds—are notorious for trapping sailing ships for days (or even weeks) without enough wind to power their sails.

Would the above qualify as one of those regions you mention, of no air flow?

If not, are you able to give some examples?

[AntonioLao]

I think so but I'm not an expert to give you a fair answer. What I think is that there might still be a subtle and complicated relationship between laminar (calm) flow and turbulent (violent) flow in contrast to no flow at all which in an enclosed room can suffocate and kill a person.