c World Scientic Publishing Company CONTINUUM CLIMATE VARIABILITY: LONG-TERM MEMORY, SCALING, AND 1/F-NOISE

Continuum temperature variability represents the response of the Earth's climate to deterministic external forcing. Scaling regimes are observed which range from hours to millennia with low frequency uctuations characterizing long-term memory. The presence of 1=f power spectra in weather and cl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Klaus Fraedrich, Richard Blender, Xiuhua Zhu
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2009
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.471.9820
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/files/forschung/theomet/docs/pdf/2009-FraeBleZhu-IJMP.pdf
Description
Summary:Continuum temperature variability represents the response of the Earth's climate to deterministic external forcing. Scaling regimes are observed which range from hours to millennia with low frequency uctuations characterizing long-term memory. The presence of 1=f power spectra in weather and climate is noteworthy: (i) In the tropical atmosphere 1=f scaling ranging from hours to weeks is found for several variables; it emerges as su-perposition of uncorrelated pulses with individual 1=f spectra. (ii) The daily discharge of the Yangtze shows 1=f within one week to one year, although the precipitation spectrum is white. (iii) Beyond one year mid-latitude sea surface temperatures reveal 1=f scaling in large parts of the global ocean. The spectra can be simulated by complex atmosphere-ocean general circulation models and understood as a two layer heat diusion process forced by an uncorrelated stochastic atmospheric. Long-term memory on time scales up to millennia are the global sea surface temperatures and the Greenland ice core records (GISP2, GRIP) with 18O temperature proxy data during the Holocene. Complex at-mosphere ocean general circulation models reproduce this behavior quantitatively up to millennia without solar variability, interacting land-ice and vegetation components.