Journal article
A topological perspective on weather regimes
- Abstract:
- It has long been suggested that the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation possesses what has come to be known as ‘weather regimes’, loosely categorised as regions of phase space with above-average density and/or extended persistence. Their existence and behaviour has been extensively studied in meteorology and climate science, due to their potential for drastically simplifying the complex and chaotic mid-latitude dynamics. Several well-known, simple non-linear dynamical systems have been used as toy-models of the atmosphere in order to understand and exemplify such regime behaviour. Nevertheless, no agreed-upon and clear-cut definition of a ‘regime’ exists in the literature, and unambiguously detecting their existence in the atmospheric circulation is stymied by the high dimensionality of the system. We argue here for an approach which equates the existence of regimes in a dynamical system with the existence of non-trivial topological structure of the system’s attractor. We show using persistent homology, an algorithmic tool in topological data analysis, that this approach is computationally tractable, practically informative, and identifies the relevant regime structure across a range of examples.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 9.4MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s00382-022-06395-x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Climate Dynamics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 60
- Issue:
- 5-6
- Pages:
- 1415-1445
- Publication date:
- 2022-07-06
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-06-20
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1432-089
- ISSN:
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0930-7575
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1171634
- Local pid:
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pubs:1171634
- Deposit date:
-
2022-07-12
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Strommen et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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