Summary


Atmospheric flows exhibit long-range spatiotemporal correlations manifested as the fractal geometry to the global cloud cover pattern concomitant with inverse power law form for power spectra of temporal fluctuations on all space-time scales ranging from turbulence(centimeters-seconds) to climate(kilometers-years). Long-range correlations are ubiquitous to dynamical systems in nature and are identified as signatures of self-organized criticality.Standard models in meteorological theory cannot explain satisfactorily the observed self-organized criticality in atmospheric flows.Mathematical models for simulation and prediction of atmospheric flows are nonlinear and do not possess analytical solutions. Finite precision computer realizations of nonlinear models give unrealistic solutions because of deterministic chaos, a direct consequence of round-off error growth in iterative numerical computations. Recent studies show that round-off error propagates to the main stream computation and gives unrealistic solutions in numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate models which incorporate thousands of iterative computations in long-term numerical integration schemes. An alternative non-deterministic cell dynamical system model for atmospheric flows described in this paper predicts the observed self-organized criticality as intrinsic to quantumlike mechanics governing flow dynamics. The model provides universal quantification for self-organized criticality in terms of the statistical normal distribution. Model predictions are in agreement with a majority of observed spectra of time series of several standard climatological data sets representative of disparate climate regimes. Universal spectrum for natural climate variability rules out linear trends. Man-made greenhouse gas related atmospheric warming will result in intensification of natural climate variability, seen immediately in high frequency fluctuations such as QBO (quasibiennial oscillation)and ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) and even shorter timescales. Model concepts and results of analyses are discussed with reference to possible prediction of climate change.


Visits

This page hosted by GeoCities Get your own Free Home Page


1