Quasi-stationary planetary waves have significant impact on weather and climate in both tropical and extra-tropical regions.Previous studies mainly focused on latitudinal fluctuations,but meridional structure and characteristic scale were unclear.Classical Rossby wave dispersion relation was used to improve calculation of horizontal full wave number in conventional steady wave,with separated zonal wave number and meridional wave number.Latitudinal and meridional characteristics describing kinematics of quasi-stationary planetary wave were obtained,characteristic spatial scales of planetary waves in the Northern Hemisphere were analyzed. In extra-tropical regions in the northern hemisphere,meridional scale of quasi-stationary planetary waves in winter was dominated by 1wave,indicating that meridional structure of quasi-stationary planetary waves was mostly of the dipole type.Latitudinal wave number was found to decrease with increasing latitude,indicating that large-scale quasi-steady waves could propagate at high latitudes while smaller scale quasi-steady waves could only propagate at lower latitudes.Analyzing phase relations of quasi-stationary planetary waves(1-3 waves in latitude)between different latitudes in winter found that quasi-stationary planetary waves between different latitudes were mainly inversely related.Further,meridional region of planetary waves was found to extend to the poles as zonal wave number decreased.Observed characteristics of latitudinal and meridional structures of quasi-stationary planetary waves in winter basically corresponded to space-time distribution characteristics of characteristic wave number in zonal and meridional directions.