The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive review and characterization of selected climate variability indices. While we discuss many major climate variability mechanisms, we focus on four principal modes of climate variability related to the dynamics of Earth’s oceans and their interactions with the atmosphere: the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). All these oscillation modes are of broad interest and considerable relevance, also in climate impact studies related to teleconnections, i.e., relationships between climate variations at distant locations. We try to decipher temporal patterns present in time series of different oscillation modes in the ocean–atmosphere system using exploratory analysis of the raw data, their structure, and properties, as well as illustrating the quasi-periodic behavior via wavelet analysis. With this contribution, we hope to help researchers in identifying and selecting data sources and climate variability indices that match their needs.

<p>The contribution deals with spatial extremes of intense precipitation at the global scale, with the help of data-driven modelling. We ask whether the inter-annual and inter-decadal climate variability track plays a dominant role in the interpretation of the variability of heavy precipitation, globally. The study aims at discovering spatially and temporally organized links between climate oscillation indices, such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Pacific Interdecadal Oscillation, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and heavy precipitation. To this aim, we induce a range of machine-learning models, primarily recurrent neural networks, from multiple sources of global observations, including E-OBS data set from the UERRA project, GPCC Full Data Daily, and climate variability indices. The models are thoroughly tested and juxtaposed in hindcasting mode on a separate test set and scrutinized with respect to their statistical characteristics. We expect to identify climate-oscillation drivers for spatial dependence of heavy precipitation.</p>