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Recurrent climate winter regimes in reconstructed and modelled 500 hPa geopotential height fields over the North Atlantic/European sector 1659–1990

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Abstract

Recurrent climate winter regimes are examined from statistically reconstructed and modelled 500 hPa geopotential height fields over the North Atlantic/European sector for the period 1659–1990. We investigate the probability density function of the state space spanned by the first two empirical orthogonal functions of combined winter data. Regimes are detected as patterns that correspond to areas of the state space with an unexpected high recurrence probability using a Monte Carlo approach. The reconstruction and the model reveal four recurrent climate regimes. They correspond to the two phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation and two opposite blocking patterns. Complemented by the investigation of the temporal evolution of the climate regimes this leads to the conclusion that the reconstructed and the modelled data for this geographic sector reproduce low-frequency atmospheric variability in the form of regime-like behaviour. The overall evidence for recurrent climate regimes is higher for the model than for the reconstruction. However, comparisons with independent data sources for the period 1659–1990 revealed a more realistic temporal evolution of the regimes for the reconstructed data.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the members of the group “Modelle und Daten” (M&D) at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI), Hamburg, Germany, for providing the data of the model simulation. Luterbacher et al. (2002) reconstructed 500 hPa geopotential height fields which can be downloaded from the NOAA Paleoclimatology World Data Center (WDC), http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/luterbacher2002/luterbacher2002.html. The software for wavelet calculation is provided by Torrence and Compo (1998) available at: http://paos.colorado.edu/research/wavelets/. This work is supported by the National Center for Competence in Research (NCCR) in Climate by the Swiss Science Foundation and by the EU project GLIMPSE (Global Implications of Arctic climate processes and feedbacks). Dr. E. Xoplaki was partially supported by the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Union (project SOAP). We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped to improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Hallerstrasse 12, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    C. Casty, E. Xoplaki, J. Luterbacher & H. Wanner

  2. NCCR Climate, University of Bern, Switzerland

    C. Casty, E. Xoplaki, J. Luterbacher & H. Wanner

  3. Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany

    D. Handorf & K. Dethloff

  4. Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, Switzerland

    C. C. Raible

  5. Department of Astrophysics and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Madrid, Spain

    J. F. González-Rouco

  6. Institute of Meteorology, Free University of Berlin, Germany

    A. Weisheimer

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  1. C. Casty
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Correspondence to C. Casty.

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Casty, C., Handorf, D., Raible, C.C. et al. Recurrent climate winter regimes in reconstructed and modelled 500 hPa geopotential height fields over the North Atlantic/European sector 1659–1990. Climate Dynamics 24, 809–822 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-004-0496-8

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