Averaging, slaving and balance dynamics in a simple atmospheric model (Q1581754)

The paper deals with a model of large-scale atmospheric motion, with a slow and fast components representing vortical motion and (inertia-) gravity waves, respectively. The authors find adiabatic invariants that drift slowly in time. This drift is consistent with a random-walk behaviour at a speed which qualitatively scales, even for modest time scale separations. As expected, the existence of an adiabatic invariant was found numerically to correspond to an exponentially small Lyapunov exponent.