Abstract
Atmospheric winds, air temperatures, water levels, precipitation and oceanic waves in the Charleston South Carolina (SC) coastal zone are evaluated for their intrinsic, internal variability over temporal scales ranging from hours to multi-decades. The purpose of this study was to bring together a plethora of atmospheric and coastal ocean state variable data in a specific locale, to assess temporal variabilities and possible relationships between variables. The questions addressed relate to the concepts of weather and climate. Data comprise the basis of this study. The overall distributions of atmospheric and coastal oceanic state variable variability, including wind speed, direction and kinematic distributions and state variable amplitudes over a variety of time scales are assessed. Annual variability is shown to be highly variable from year to year, making arithmetic means mathematically tractable but physically meaningless. Employing empirical and statistical methodologies, data analyses indicate the same number of intrinsic, internal modes of temporal variability in atmospheric temperatures, coastal wind and coastal water level time series, ranging from hours to days to weeks to seasons, sub-seasons, annual, multi-year, decades, and centennial time scales. This finding demonstrates that the atmosphere and coastal ocean in a southeastern U.S. coastal city are characterized by a set of similar frequency and amplitude modulated phenomena. Kinematic hodograph descriptors of atmospheric winds reveal coherent rotating and rectilinear particle motions. A mathematical statistics-based wind to wave-to-wave algorithm is developed and applied to offshore marine buoy data to create an hour-by-hour forecast capability from 1 to 24 hours; with confidence levels put forward. This affects a different approach to the conventional deterministic model forecasting of waves.
Highlights
The atmospheric weather to sub-seasonal variability in southern climates is very difficult to predict, as southern U.S states are in highly convective environments most of the year
We show that atmospheric temperature, wind and sea-level variability at Charleston South Carolina (SC) reflect a suite of nonlinear and non-stationary phenomena that are individually identifiable and are occurring simultaneously
We propose that the weather to climate spectra in the atmosphere constitute an overlapping continuum, with shorter period oscillations riding atop longer period oscillations and atop overall record length trends
Summary
The atmospheric weather to sub-seasonal variability in southern climates is very difficult to predict, as southern U.S states are in highly convective environments most of the year. Interactive couplings of land, ocean and atmospheric boundary layers complicate coastal zone weather forecasting, of winds and precipitation. This is true of oceanic coastal water levels and wave fields in southern environs [1]. Empirical [2] [3] [4] and statistical [5] [6] methodologies are employed on the data sets, which contain highly nonlinear and non-stationary data
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