Spatial and temporal scales of atmospheric dynamics

Abstract: Earth climate, in general, varies on many temporal and spatial scales. In particular, climate observables exhibit recurring patterns and quasi-oscillatory phenomena with different periods. Although these oscillations might be weak in amplitude, they might have a non-negligible influence on variability on shorter time-scales due to cross-scale interactions, recently observed by Paluš. This thesis supplies an introductory material for inferring the cross-scale information transfer from observational data, where the time series of interest are obtained using wavelet transform, and possible information transfer is studied using the tools from information theory. Finally, cross-scale interactions are studied in two climate phenomena: air temperature variability in Europe, in which we study phase-amplitude coupling from a slower oscillatory mode with an 8-year period on faster variability and its effects, and El Niño / Southern Oscillation where we observe a causal chain of phase-phase and phase-amplitude couplings among distinct oscillatory modes.

• my role: main investigator | all the science
• supervised by: Milan Paluš, Institute of Computer Science, CAS, Prague
• funded by: Charles University (PhD stipend) & Institute of Computer Science, Czech Academy of Sciences: internal funding scheme

Relevant outputs

• two publications:
  1. Synchronization and causality across time scales in El Niño Southern Oscillation
  2. Time scales of the European surface air temperature variability: The role of the 7 – 8 year cycle
• PhD thesis