Fig. 1

Links in the middle atmosphere. A schematic showing the relationship between various components affecting the large-scale structure of the middle atmosphere. The main elements appear in the green boxes, and the processes linking them appear in the blue boxes. The arrows indicate the direction of the influence. Although thermal wind balance links the zonal mean temperature and wind structure, wave and constituent fields affect the heating and momentum deposition leading to these structures and themselves depend non-linearly on these large-scale structures