Signature of recent climate change in frequencies of natural atmospheric circulation regimes

Corti, Susanna; Molteni, Franco; Palmer, Tim

doi:10.1038/19745

Cited by 537 publications

(503 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(3 reference statements)

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“…This is in contrast to the conjecture by Rossby (1941), Palmer (1999), and Corti et al (1999) that external forcing only affects the mean residence times (called 'occupation frequencies') of dynamical states. Palmer supported this hypothesis by using as an example the well-known Lorenz dynamical system, which (for a certain range of the system parameters) has two basic states (attractors) in its phase space.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 49%

Residence time distributions of the Northern Annular Mode

Ruzmaikin

2009

Intl Journal of Climatology

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ABSTRACT:The Northern Annular Mode (NAM) is a large-scale climatic anomaly pattern characterizing the atmospheric circulation in the polar and the mid-latitude regions. To help in understanding the basic physics underlying the NAM we determine and examine the probability distributions of residence times in the positive and negative phases of the NAM. These distributions are found to have only slightly different mean residence times but differ strongly in their tails. The difference in the tails of the distributions expresses a dominance of one phase of the NAM over the other during rarely occurring events such as the dominant positive NAM in the mid 1960s to the late 1990s.We investigate a possible influence of solar variability on the residence time distributions and find that at high solar activity the NAM spends slightly more time in its negative phase in the stratosphere and slightly less time (compared to the positive phase) in the troposphere. Much stronger influence on the NAM may occur during rare but prolonged changes in solar activity. This extends the conjecture that external forcing only affects the mean residence times ('occupation frequencies') of the dynamical states. An example is the dominance of the negative NAM during the 70-year long Maunder Minimum.The distributions are consistent with generation by a non-linear process of random transitions between two equilibrium states of a system with the addition of a small forced component. A simple two-well potential model provides an approximate description of this process elucidating its dynamics as well as the effect of external influences on the annular modes. Published in

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 49%

Residence time distributions of the Northern Annular Mode

Ruzmaikin

2009

Intl Journal of Climatology

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“…Four weather regimes are assumed, as is done in previous studies [Corti et al, 1999;Michelangeli et al, 1995]. The centroids of the weather regime clusters are displayed in Figure 2a.…”

Section: Fall/winter 2006/2007 Weather Regimesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A possible answer has been proposed by Corti et al [1999] among others [Coppola et al, 2005;Philipp et al, 2007;Terray and Cassou, 2002] who stated that surface temperature warming in Europe could be mostly explained by a reorganisation of atmospheric circulation patterns rather than directly through anthropogenic radiative forcing. Our paper revisits and tests this paradigm, in the perspective of observations during the last decade.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[17] Interestingly, the excess temperature relative to that of flow analogues starts to appear during the last decade (1997 -2006) (Figure 4 [Corti et al, 1999], however, most of tropospheric climate changes were found to be attributable to changes in frequency of global atmospheric flow regimes. That study used atmospheric data until 1994 and changes that occurred in the preceding decades.…”

Section: Temperature Anomaly Of 2006/2007 and Recent Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Inconsistency between atmospheric dynamics and temperatures during the exceptional 2006/2007 fall/winter and recent warming in Europe

Yiou¹,

Vautard²,

Naveau³

et al. 2007

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…Weather regimes are examples of such flow regimes that are manifested as particular atmospheric conditions on a regional scale with time scales roughly on the range of 10-100 days (Reinhold and Pierrehumbert 1982;Barnston and Livezey 1987;Vautard and Legras 1988;Ghil and Robertson 2002). The application of the concept of weather regimes in the analysis of mid-and high-latitude 1 3 synoptic systems has provided us with a deeper understanding of intrinsic climate variability (Molteni et al 1990;Michelangeli et al 1995;Cassou et al 2004;Guemas et al 2009), with potential benefits to weather and climate prediction capability (Mo and Ghil 1988;Brankovic and Molteni 1997;Cassou 2008;Riddle et al 2013) and possibly to longterm climate change (Corti et al 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamical prediction of Arctic sea ice modes of variability

et al. 2018

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This study explores the prediction skill of the northern hemisphere (NH) sea ice thickness (SIT) modes of variability in a state-of-the-art coupled forecast system with respect to two statistical forecast benchmarks. Application of the K-means clustering method on a historical reconstruction of SIT from 1958 to 2013, produced by an ocean-sea-ice general circulation model, identifies three Arctic SIT clusters or modes of climate variability. These SIT modes have consistent patterns in different calendar months and their discrete time series of occurrences show persistence on intraseasonal to interannual time scales. We use the EC-Earth2.3 coupled climate model to produce five-member 12-month-long monthly forecasts of the NH SIT modes initialized on 1 May and 1 November every year from 1979 to 2010. We use a three-state first-order Markov chain and climatological probability forecasts determined from the historical SIT mode reconstruction as two statistical reference forecasts. The analysis of ranked probability skill scores (RPSSs) relating these three forecast systems shows that the dynamical SIT mode forecasts typically have a higher skill than the Markov chain forecasts, which are overall better than climatological forecasts. The evolution of RPSS in forecast time indicates that the transition from the sea-ice melting season to growing season in the EC-Earth2.3 forecasts, with respect to the Markov chain model, typically leads to the improvement of prediction skill. The reliability diagrams overall show better reliability of the dynamical forecasts than that of the Markov chain model, especially for 1 May start dates, while dynamical forecasts with 1 November start dates are overconfident. The relative operating characteristics (ROC) diagrams confirm this hierarchy of forecast skill among these three forecast systems. Furthermore, ROC diagrams stratified in groups of 3 sequential forecast months show that Arctic SIT mode forecasts initialized on 1 November typically lose resolution with forecast time more slowly than forecasts initialized on 1 May.

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Signature of recent climate change in frequencies of natural atmospheric circulation regimes

Cited by 537 publications

References 23 publications

Residence time distributions of the Northern Annular Mode

Residence time distributions of the Northern Annular Mode

Inconsistency between atmospheric dynamics and temperatures during the exceptional 2006/2007 fall/winter and recent warming in Europe

Dynamical prediction of Arctic sea ice modes of variability

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