Paleo-Sciences including palaeoclimatology and palaeoecology have accumulated numerous records related to climatic changes. The researchers have usually tried to identify periodic and quasi-periodic processes in these paleoscientific records. In this paper, we show that this analysis is incomplete. As follows from our results, random processes, namely processes with a single-time-constant (noise with a Lorentzian noise spectrum), play a very important and, perhaps, a decisive role in numerous natural phenomena. For several of very important natural phenomena the characteristic time constants are very similar and equal to (5-8)x10^3 years. However, this value is not universal. For example, the spectral density fluctuations of the atmospheric radiocarbon 14C are characterized by a Lorentzian with time constant 300 years. The frequency dependence of spectral density fluctuations for benthic 18O records contains two Lorentzians with time constans 8000 years and > 105 years.
Most of the existing prediction methods gave a false alarm regarding the El Niño event in 2014. A crucial aspect is currently limiting the success of such predictions, i.e. the stability of the slowly varying Pacific climate. This property determines whether sea surface temperature perturbations will be amplified by coupled ocean-atmosphere feedbacks or not. The so-called Bjerknes stability index has been developed for this purpose, but its evaluation is severely constrained by data availability. Here we present a new promising background stability index based on complex network theory. This i…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject to various external forcings, natural as well as anthropogenic. This paper reviews the observational evidence on climate phenomena and the governing equations of planetary-scale flow, as well as presenting the key concept of a hierarchy of models as used in the climate sciences. Recent advances in the application of dynamical systems theory, on the one hand…
Atmosphere and ocean are coupled via air-sea interactions. The atmospheric conditions fuel the ocean circulation and its variability, but the extent to which ocean processes can affect the atmosphere at decadal time scales remains unclear. In particular, such low-frequency variability is difficult to extract from the short observational record, meaning that climate models are the primary tools deployed to resolve this question. Here, we assess how the ocean's intrinsic variability leads to patterns of upper-ocean heat content that vary at decadal time scales. These patterns have the potential …
It is shown that global climate exhibits chaotic response to solar forcing variability in a vast range of timescales: from annual to multi-millennium. Unlike linear systems, where periodic forcing leads to periodic response, nonlinear chaotic response to periodic forcing can result in exponentially decaying broad-band power spectrum with decay rate T_e equal to the period of the forcing. It is shown that power spectrum of a reconstructed time series of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomaly for the past 2,000 years has an exponentially decaying broad-band part with T_e = 11 yr, i.e. the obser…
Earth's temperature variability can be partitioned into internal and externally-forced components. Yet, underlying mechanisms and their relative contributions remain insufficiently understood, especially on decadal to centennial timescales. Important reasons for this are difficulties in isolating internal and externally-forced variability. Here, we provide a physically-motivated emulation of global mean surface temperature (GMST) variability, which allows for the separation of internal and external variations. To this end, we introduce the ``ClimBayes'' software package, which infers climate p…
We explore the effects of seasonal variability for the climate of Earth-like planets as determined by the two parameters polar obliquity and orbital eccentricity using a general circulation model of intermediate complexity. In the first part of the paper we examine the consequences of different values of obliquity and eccentricity for the spatio-temporal patterns of radiation and surface temperatures as well as for the main characteristics of the atmospheric circulations. In the second part we analyse the associated implications for the habitability of planets close to the outer edge of the ha…
Earth's climate can be understood as a dynamical system that changes due to external forcing and internal couplings. Essential climate variables, such as surface air temperature, describe this dynamics. Our current interglacial, the Holocene (11,700 yr ago to today), has been characterized by small variations in global mean temperature prior to anthropogenic warming. However, the mechanisms and spatiotemporal patterns of fluctuations around this mean, called temperature variability, are poorly understood despite their socio-economic relevance. Here, we examine discrepancies between temperature…
Downscaling with AI reveals the large role of internal variability in fine-scale projections of climate extremes
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA)（国家水气和大气研究所）；ARC Centre of Excellence for Weather of the 21st Century（21世纪天气卓越研究中心）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学气候变化研究中心）；Te Aka Mātuatua School of Science, University of Waikato（怀卡托大学理学院）
We carry out climate simulations for 1880-2003 with GISS modelE driven by ten measured or estimated climate forcings. An ensemble of climate model runs is carried out for each forcing acting individually and for all forcing mechanisms acting together. We compare side-by-side simulated climate change for each forcing, all forcings, observations, unforced variability among model ensemble members, and, if available, observed variability. Discrepancies between observations and simulations with all forcings are due to model deficiencies, inaccurate or incomplete forcings, and imperfect observations…
It is known that the so-called problem of solar power pacemaker related to possible existence of some hidden but key mechanism of energy influence of the Sun on fundamental geophysical processes is one of the principal and puzzling problems of modern climatology. The "tracks" of this mechanism have been shown up in different problems of solar-terrestrial physics for a long time and, in particular, in climatology, where the solar-climate variability is stably observed. However, the mechanisms by which small changes in the Sun's energy (solar irradiance or insolation) output during the solar cyc…
Over recent decades, the Arctic Ocean has experienced dramatic changes due to climate change. Retreating sea ice has opened up large areas of ocean, resulting in an enhanced wave climate. Taking into account the intense seasonality and the rapid changes to the Arctic climate, a non-stationary approach is applied to time-varying statistical properties to investigate historical trends of extreme values. The analysis is based on a 28-year wave hindcast (from 1991 to 2018) carried out with the WAVEWATCH III wave model forced by ERA5 wind speed. The results show notable seasonal differences and rob…
North Atlantic climate during glacial times was characterized by large-amplitude switchings, the Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events, with an apparent tendency to recur preferably in multiples of about 1470 years. Recent work interpreted these intervals as resulting from a subharmonic response of a highly nonlinear system to quasi-periodic solar forcing plus noise. This hypothesis was challenged as inconsistent with the observed variability in the phase relation between proxies of solar activity and Greenland climate. Here we reject the claim of inconsistency by showing that this phase variability …
Understanding the atmospheric low-frequency variability is of crucial importance in fields such as climate studies, climate change detection, and extended-range weather forecast. The Northern Hemisphere climate features the planetary waves as a relevant ingredient of the atmospheric variability. Several observations and theoretical arguments seem to support the idea that winter planetary waves indicator obey a non-Gaussian statistics and may present a multimodal probability density function, thus characterizing the low-frequency portion of the climate system. We show that the upper tropospheri…
Over its multibillion-year history, the Earth has experienced a wide range of climates. The long-term climate is controlled by the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which is regulated by marine sequestration through chemical weathering. This chemical weathering sink is strongly linked to the distribution and composition of the continents. However, the effect of continental distribution has never been studied within a general framework. Here we show that the global weathering rate is sensitive to the size and shape of the continents, but is not well explained by the amount of land in th…
Global atmospheric reanalyses have become a common tool for both the validation of climate models and diagnostic studies, such as assessing climate variability and long-term trends. Presently, the 20th Century Reanalysis (20CR), which assimilates only surface pressure reports, sea-ice, and sea surface temperature distributions, represents the longest global reanalysis dataset available covering the period from 1871 to the present. Currently, the 20CR dataset is extensively used for the assessment of climate variability and trends. Here, we compare the variability and long-term trends in Northe…
We compare, for the overlapping time frame 1962-2000, the estimate of the northern hemisphere (NH) mid-latitude winter atmospheric variability within the XX century simulations of 17 global climate models (GCMs) included in the IPCC-4AR with the NCEP and ECMWF reanalyses. We compute the Hayashi spectra of the 500hPa geopotential height fields and introduce an integral measure of the variability observed in the NH on different spectral sub-domains. Only two high-resolution GCMs have a good agreement with reanalyses. Large biases, in most cases larger than 20%, are found between the wave climato…
Elucidating the statistical properties of extreme meteo-climatic events and capturing the physical processes responsible for their occurrence are key steps for improving our understanding of climate variability and climate change and for better evaluating the associated hazards. It has recently become apparent that large deviation theory is very useful for investigating persistent extreme events, and specifically, for flexibly estimating long return periods and for introducing a notion of dynamical typicality. Using a methodological framework based on large deviation theory and taking advantag…
Klaus Hasselmann's revolutionary intuition in climate science was to take advantage of the stochasticity associated with fast weather processes to probe the slow dynamics of the climate system. This has led to fundamentally new ways to study the response of climate models to perturbations, and to perform detection and attribution for climate change signals. Hasselmann's program has been extremely influential in climate science and beyond. We first summarise the main aspects of such a program using modern concepts and tools of statistical physics and applied mathematics. We then provide an over…
