The angular momentum budget of the Earth represents a beautiful and simple example of how the various climatic elements (atmosphere, oceans and solid Earth) work together and are united through a basic physical conservation law, despite enormous differences in their space and time scales and in their masses.
The angular momentum is a vector quantity that is the product of the moment of inertia and the angular velocity. Here we will consider only the component of the angular momentum vector that is parallel to the Earth's polar axis. In the case of the atmosphere it has two components, one connected with the solid rotation of the Earth, the Ω-angular momentum, and the other with the zonal component of the air flow with respect to the rotating Earth, the relative angular momentum: M = M Ω + M r (see Figure A9). Most of the temporal variability is found in the relative angular momentum.
Schematic diagram of the atmospheric angular momentum around the Earth's axis of rotation, M...
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Oort, A.H. (1997). Angular momentum cycle in planet earth . In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4520-4_11
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