[Res] Convection and gyres

I have decided that, from now on, I will prefix [Res] to posts in which I will talk about things closely related to what I study. I will still try to make them as simple as possible though!

Just wanted to make a quick update on interesting things I've seen on the latest active MJO, which is now creeping close to the Maritime continent, as seen in the latest water vapori image from NRL. First of all, check out all those deep colors there!  Also, take a look at TS 5  a little north going to an inevitable landfall.

But what has really been  getting my attention lately has been all the apparent rotation that the model analyses keeps showing. Below is a plot of non-divergent winds and vorticity contours (Note that for this plot, negative values in the southern hemisphere is cyclonic).  There are four clear cyclonic gyres in the Indian Ocean right now (one of them being TS 5).

If we overlay them with satellite IR (once again from NRL), we can observe that some of them roughly correspond to cloud activity. It is worthwhile to notice that they seem to pop up more and more to the east as the MJO propagates, and grow as they move westward, although I do not have enough info to back it up solidly. This is why the MJO is considered a complex, made out of cloud superclusters and propagating waves inside the packet.  In the figure below I also added a red arrow indicating the westerly winds associated with this complex. They seem to have maintained the same strength through the last couple of days.