Climate Patterns: Origin and Forcing

Alexander Ruzmaikin

doi:10.4236/ajcc.2021.102010

Alexander Ruzmaikin

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4236/ajcc.2021.102010

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Abstract

This brief review described spatial-time climate patterns generated by the dynamics and thermodynamics of the Earth’s climate system and methods of identifying these patterns. Specifically, it does discuss the following major climate patterns: El Ni?o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Cold Ocean-Warm Land (COWL) pattern, Northern and Southern Annular Patterns (NAM and SAM), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), Pacific North-American Pattern (PNA) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation Pattern (PDO). In view of an extensive number of publications on some climate patterns, such as the ENSO, which discussed in many hundred of publications, this review is not intended to cover all the details of individual climate patterns but intends only to give a general overview of their structure, mechanisms of their formation and response to external forcing. It is assumed that the climate patterns can be treated as attractors of dynamical systems allowing us to extract and predict some specific features of the patterns such as the origin and evolution of the climate patterns and their role in climate change. Thus the knowledge of patterns allows the climate prediction on long time scales and understanding of how an external forcing affects the frequency of occurrence of climate patterns and their magnitude but not the spatial structure.

Highlights

The observed temperature and other physical variables are not uniformly distributed over the Earth’s surface, in its ocean and atmosphere
After all the questions arise: 1) why should we be interested in climate patterns, and 2) is there a need to advantage the knowledge of them
To advance the knowledge of climate patterns it would be important to better understand the mechanisms of their formation

Summary

Introduction

The observed temperature and other physical variables are not uniformly distributed over the Earth’s surface, in its ocean and atmosphere. They are typically forming space-time clusters called weather and climate patterns. The ubiquitous and well-understood weather patterns are cyclones and anticyclones. An anticyclone (High) has opposite sign of rotation. The Earth’s climate system consists of two subsystems: the fast, “weather” type (mostly the atmosphere) and the slow one that includes the ocean and other slow-responding Earth’s components (Hasselmann, 1976). The fast component can be averaged to serve as a source term to the slow system. The climate patterns arise as the major component of the slow subsystem

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Conclusion