Is there a climatic attractor?

Cross-Scale Interactions and Information Transfer

“…In a search for a low-dimensional explanation of some scales of atmospheric dynamics, in the 1980s several researchers claimed detections of a weather or climate attractor of a low dimension [48][49][50][51]. Leading personalities of chaos theory, however, pointed to a limited reliability of chaos-identification algorithms and warned that the observed low-dimensional weather/climate attractors can be spurious [52,53].…”

On the dynamics of ocean ambient noise: Two decades later

“…28 Earlier studies used finite D 2 estimate as evidence for chaos, but some of the results were a matter of concern. 26,[29][30][31] Evidence for a fractal attractor is given if the local slopes are constant for a large enough range of small radii and do not change for higher embedding dimensions. There are instances where finite D 2 estimated is obtained for colored noises with stochastic dependencies.…”

Strange Attractors in Drift Wave Turbulence

“…This means that the low-dimensional attractor is somewhere between a point (D = 0) and a line (D = 1). Since the system has many degrees of freedom, such a low-dimensional may seem surprising; however, for a very different physical system, Nicolis and Nicolis [12] have found a strange attractor with a small dimension D in a system with many degrees of freedom (see next section) The key factor here is the rate of phase space contraction. To pursue this argument, we have measured the dependence of the correlation exponent α on the collision frequency (Figure 1; right).…”

“…In a different context, Nicolis and Nicolis [12] have studied the attractor associated with the climatic evolution over the past million years based on isotope records of deepsea cores. The surprising result of Nicolis and Nicolis's work is that, although the climate has very many degrees of freedom, a well-defined low-dimensional attractor was identified based on the experimental time series.…”