MJO diagnosis
This protocol is extracted from research article:
Diversity of the Madden-Julian Oscillation
Sci Adv, Jul 31, 2019; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax0220

To diagnose the MJO structure, circulation and thermodynamic fields were depicted by compositing 20- to 70-day filtered anomalies of horizontal winds, vertical velocity, EPT, and diabatic heating fields with regard to the phases at the reference location in the EIO (i.e., compositing pentad mean of the selected MJO events with central date being the reference date). This location was chosen because, in the EIO, the mean state tends to be more equatorially symmetric, the corresponding MJO precipitation and circulation are also more symmetric at the equator, and thus it is more suitable for the study of the structure of the MJO with less influence from the mean flows. Because no observed diabatic heating field was available, we estimated it using the budget analysis proposed by Yanai et al. (24). The condensational heating was estimated by the moisture sink defined asQ2=Lv(qt+Vq+ωqp)where Lv is the latent heat at condensation, q is the specific humidity, V refers to the horizontal components of the wind, and ω is the vertical velocity. This quantity was first calculated by daily data, and time filter was applied to the variable to retrieve the intraseasonal component.


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