Dominant transport pathways in an atmospheric blocking event

A Lagrangian flow network is constructed for the atmospheric blocking of Eastern Europe and Western Russia in summer 2010. We compute the most probable paths followed by fluid particles, which reveal the Omega-block skeleton of the event. A hierarchy of sets of highly probable paths is introduced to describe transport pathways when the most probable path alone is not representative enough. These sets of paths have the shape of narrow coherent tubes flowing close to the most probable one. Thus, even when the most probable path is not very significant in terms of its probability, it still identifies the geometry of the transport pathways.