No Arabic abstract
We formulate and study a low-order nonlinear coupled ocean-atmosphere model with an emphasis on the impact of radiative and heat fluxes and of the frictional coupling between the two components. This model version extends a previous 24-variable version by adding a dynamical equation for the passive advection of temperature in the ocean, together with an energy balance model. The bifurcation analysis and the numerical integration of the model reveal the presence of low-frequency variability (LFV) concentrated on and near a long-periodic, attracting orbit. This orbit combines atmospheric and oceanic modes, and it arises for large values of the meridional gradient of radiative input and of frictional coupling. Chaotic behavior develops around this orbit as it loses its stability; this behavior is still dominated by the LFV on decadal and multi-decadal time scales that is typical of oceanic processes. Atmospheric diagnostics also reveals the presence of predominant low- and high-pressure zones, as well as of a subtropical jet; these features recall realistic climatological properties of the oceanic atmosphere. Finally, a predictability analysis is performed. Once the decadal-scale periodic orbits develop, the coupled systems short-term instabilities --- as measured by its Lyapunov exponents --- are drastically reduced, indicating the oceans stabilizing role on the atmospheric dynamics. On decadal time scales, the recurrence of the solution in a certain region of the invariant subspace associated with slow modes displays some extended predictability, as reflected by the oscillatory behavior of the error for the atmospheric variables at long lead times.
The impact of the El Ni~no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the extratropics is investigated in an idealized, reduced-order model that has a tropical and an extratropical module. Unidirectional ENSO forcing is used to mimick the atmospheric bridge between the tropics and the extratropics. The variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere extratropical module is then investigated through the analysis of its pullback attractors (PBAs). This analysis focuses on two types of ENSO forcing generated by the tropical module, one periodic and the other aperiodic. For a substantial range of the ENSO forcing, two chaotic PBAs are found to coexist for the same set of parameter values. Different types of extratropical low-frequency variability are associated with either PBA over the parameter ranges explored. For periodic ENSO forcing, the coexisting PBAs exhibit only weak nonlinear instability. For chaotic forcing, though, they are quite unstable and certain extratropical perturbations induce transitions between the two PBAs. These distinct stability properties may have profound consequences for extratropical climate predictions: in particular, ensemble averaging may no longer help isolate the low-frequency variability signal.
We suggest a way of rationalizing an intra-seasonal oscillations (IOs) of the Earth atmospheric flow as four meteorological relevant triads of interacting planetary waves, isolated from the system of all the rest planetary waves. Our model is independent of the topography (mountains, etc.) and gives a natural explanation of IOs both in the North and South Hemispheres. Spherical planetary waves are an example of a wave mesoscopic system obeying discrete resonances that also appears in other areas of physics.
We construct one-dimensional nonlinear lattices having the special property such that the Umklapp process vanishes and only the normal processes are included in the potential functions. We study heat transport in these lattices by non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation. It is shown that the ballistic heat transport occurs, i.e., the scaling law $kappapropto N$ holds between the thermal conductivity $kappa$ and the lattice size $N$. This result directly validates Peierlss hypothesis that only the Umklapp processes can cause the thermal resistance while the normal one do not.
This paper describes a reduced-order quasi-geostrophic coupled ocean-atmosphere model that allows for an arbitrary number of atmospheric and oceanic modes to be retained in the spectral decomposition. The modularity of this new model allows one to easily modify the model physics. Using this new model, coined the Modular Arbitrary-Order Ocean-Atmosphere Model (MAOOAM), we analyse the dependence of the model dynamics on the truncation level of the spectral expansion, and unveil spurious behaviour that may exist at low resolution by a comparison with the higher-resolution configurations. In particular, we assess the robustness of the coupled low-frequency variability when the number of modes is increased. An optimal configuration is proposed for which the ocean resolution is sufficiently high, while the total number of modes is small enough to allow for a tractable and extensive analysis of the dynamics.
A new framework is proposed for the evaluation of stochastic subgrid-scale parameterizations in the context of MAOOAM, a coupled ocean-atmosphere model of intermediate complexity. Two physically-based parameterizations are investigated, the first one based on the singular perturbation of Markov operator, also known as homogenization. The second one is a recently proposed parameterization based on the Ruelles response theory. The two parameterization are implemented in a rigorous way, assuming however that the unresolved scale relevant statistics are Gaussian. They are extensively tested for a low-order version known to exhibit low-frequency variability, and some preliminary results are obtained for an intermediate-order version. Several different configurations of the resolved-unresolved scale separations are then considered. Both parameterizations show remarkable performances in correcting the impact of model errors, being even able to change the modality of the probability distributions. Their respective limitations are also discussed.