Quantifying chaos in the atmosphere

Abstract

The atmosphere is known to be forced by a variety of energy sources, including radiation and heat fluxes emanating from the boundary layer associated with sea-surface temperature anomalies and land-surface features. The atmosphere is also subject to internal variability which is essentially unforced and is thought to be a basic characteristic of fluids. Whereas much work has been done in quantifying the links between external forcing of the atmosphere and its long-term response as well as the influence of boundary layer forcing in determining organized, large-scale modes of planetary-scale circulation, less is known about the importance of internal variability or chaos in determining the evolution of weather and climate. General circulation models (GCMs) now provide for this possibility. Multiple evolutions of the climate system may be computed in GCM simulations. Where these simulations are identical except for the conditions by which the model is initialized, the degree of departure in the evolution of climate from one model run to the next corresponds precisely to the degree of internal variability or chaos present in the model atmosphere. A methodology for quantifying this chaotic forcing is considered and is applied to century-long integrations of the UK Meteorological Office model HADAM2A.