Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Environmental Sciences: A Students Companion

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Progress in Physical Geography
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Washington, R.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Quantifying chaos in the atmosphere

Richard Washington

School of Geography, University of Oxford, Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB, UK

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.

Key Words: atmosphere • chaos • forced variability • GCMs • initial conditions • internal variability

Progress in Physical Geography, Vol. 24, No. 4, 499-514 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/030913330002400402
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Prog Hum GeogrHome page
M. Jones
Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond
Progress in Human Geography, August 1, 2009; 33(4): 487 - 506.
[Abstract] [PDF]

Home page
 Progress in Physical GeographyHome page
W. Soon and S. Baliunas
Global warming
Progress in Physical Geography, September 1, 2003; 27(3): 448 - 455.
[PDF]