Continuum climate variability:long-term memory, scaling, and 1/F-noise

• Published in: International Journal of Modern Physics B
• Main Authors: Fraedrich, K., Blender, R., Zhu, X.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Greenland; Greenland ice core; GRIP; ice core
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000B-463B-5

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 fluctuations 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 superposition 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 diffusion 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 delta O-18 temperature proxy data during the Holocene. Complex atmosphere ocean general circulation models reproduce this behavior quantitatively up to millennia without solar variability, interacting land-ice and vegetation components.