The West Coast Thermal Trough: Climatology and Synoptic Evolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although the West Coast thermal trough (WCTT) is the most important mesoscale feature over the U.S. west coast during the warm season, its initiation, evolution, and structure are not well understood. Originating in the southwest United States, this inverted trough can extend northward into Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, with large impacts on temperature, wind, humidity, and air quality. Using NCEP’s North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), annual and diurnal climatologies of WCTTs reaching the northwest United States were constructed. For the entire year, WCTTs are most frequent along the coast near the California–Oregon border, with weaker maxima west of the Cascade and coastal mountains. Over the coastal region, they occur most often during autumn, while east of the Cascade Mountains, the highest frequency is during summer. There is strong diurnal variability in WCTT frequency during the summer, with little diurnal variation in winter. Though compositing revealed important seasonal differences in WCTT evolution, some common features emerged. An upper-level ridge moves over the northwest United States and associated high pressure builds in the lower troposphere over southwest Canada, resulting in the development of near-surface easterlies and downslope flow over the western slopes of major terrain barriers of the region. Simultaneously, the WCTT extends northward from California into the Pacific Northwest. As the synoptic configuration changes, the WCTT either moves eastward and merges with the larger thermal low over the Great Basin region, which is most common in summer, or it recedes back into California and dissipates, as often happens in winter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".