The experiments show that the travelling waves strongly vacillate with time due to the topographic forcing. Otherwise in the experiments with the same imposed external conditions but without topography, the baroclinic waves would travel regularly with almost no vacillation. It was found that a prominent feature in the flow with the topographic forcing is large-scale wave vacillation with a period of 127 annulus rotations, which is equivalent to approximately 26 days in the Earth’s atmosphere. The experiments also show that the role of topography is to modulate the unstable baroclinic waves both in space and in time.In the second part of this paper, a series of comparative experiments is introduced to study the influences of heat sources and topography on the large-scale baroclinic background flows defined as the flow patterns determined by Ω, the angular velocity of the annulus rotation and △T, the radial temperature difference between the inner and outer walls of the annulus. The flow patterns depend
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