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Free keywords:
atmospheric teleconnections, stochastic modelling, dimension reduction
Abstract:
Using reanalysed atmospheric data and applying a data-driven multiscale approximation to nonstationary
dynamical processes, we undertake a systematic examination of the role of memory and dimensionality
in dening the quasi-stationary states of the troposphere over the recent decades. We focus on the
role of teleconnections characterised by either zonally-oriented wave trains or meridional dipolar structures.
We consider the impact of various strategies for dimension reduction based on principal component analysis,
diagonalization and truncation.We include the impact of memory by consideration of Bernoulli, Markovian
and non-Markovian processes. We a priori explicitly separate barotropic and baroclinic processes and then
implement a comprehensive sensitivity analysis to the number and type of retained modes. Our results show
the importance of explicitly mitigating the deleterious impacts of signal degradation through ill-conditioning
and under sampling in preference to simple strategies based on thresholds in terms of explained variance. In
both hemispheres, the results obtained for the dominant tropospheric modes depend critically on the extent
to which the higher order modes are retained, the number of free model parameters to be tted, and whether
memory eects are taken into account. Our study identies the primary role of the circumglobal teleconnection
pattern in both hemispheres for Bernoulli and Markov processes, and the transient nature and zonal
structure of the Southern Hemisphere patterns in relation to their Northern Hemisphere counterparts. For
both hemispheres, overtted models yield structures consistent with the major teleconnection modes (NAO,
PNA and SAM), which give way to zonally oriented wavetrains when either memory eects are ignored or
where the dimension is reduced via diagonalising. Where baroclinic processes are emphasised, circumpolar
wavetrains are manifest.
