“why the heck does it always travel east?”

I mean, come on. This one is pretty obvious.

The driver injecting energy in this system is heating from the Sun. The boundary on the surface between where the heating is happening and where it isn't is constantly moving West.

Other than that, there may be some interesting connection between quantum topology and Kelvin waves, but I doubt it is of practical use.

Cool shit, thanks for posting!

An endorsement from Geoff Vallis? This might be interesting.