Experimenting with a similarity measure for atmospheric flows

The data related to four atmospheric pressure-levels during 14 winters are used in order to check a recently introduced measure of the "separation" between two atmospheric states. The fields of variables considered are: horizontal velocities, density and temperature. It is found that this new measure performs, in some respects, better than the geopotential-height or the kinetic-energy measures. In the jet regions, the new measure is almost identical to the kinetic-energy measure.