North Atlantic atmospheric and ocean decadal climate variability – dominant patterns and abrupt climate shifts ...

• Main Author: Demirov, Entcho
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery 2018
• Subjects: Greenland; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0366962; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0366962

The atmosphere and ocean of the North Atlantic have undergone significant changes in the past century. To understand these changes, their mechanisms, and their regional implications requires a quantitative understanding of processes in the coupled ocean and atmosphere system. Central to this understanding is the role played by the dominant patterns of ocean and atmospheric variability which define coherent variations in physical characteristics over large areas. Four dominant subseasonal weather regimes are defined using Bayesian Gaussian mixture models. All correlation patterns of the Sea Level Pressure (SLP) anomalies with the membership probability timeseries for the weather regimes show similarities with the dipole structure typical for the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The SLP patterns of two of the regimes represent the opposite phases NAO+ and NAO-. The two other weather regimes, the Atlantic Ridge (AR) and Scandinavian-Greenland dipole (SG), have dipole spatial structures with the northern and ...