Category: Physics

Summary: Estimating when stronger orographic recirculation turns a coast-pinned storm mode into a balanced coastal-ridge-interior atmospheric-river bridge.

Atmospheric rivers deliver intense moisture to mountain barriers, where coastal flow, barrier jets, and lee-side spillover compete to shape where amplification occurs. This experiment asks when stronger orographic recirculation makes the leading transport mode span the coast, ridge, and inland side instead of remaining concentrated near the coast.

The code constructs dense disordered moisture-transport operators and applies iterative deepening with repeated eigensolves to bisect the recirculation threshold across sizes from N=64 to 2048. The emphasis is on the geometry of the dominant amplification mode, distinguishing a balanced bridge pattern from a storm mode pinned to one side of the topography.

That makes the result a structural threshold for moisture transport rather than only a bulk precipitation calculation. The docstring notes broad case-study literature on atmospheric rivers and barrier jets, but not this kind of dense finite-size bisection map for bridge-localized amplification modes.

Method: Dense symmetric eigensolves with iterative deepening and bisection on orographic-recirculation strength in disordered moisture-transport operators.

What is measured: Critical recirculation threshold, coastal-ridge-interior bridge amplification, coast-pinned versus balanced mode character, and bracket width.