The wavelets and hierarchies of the climate system

Summary

Wavelet analysis of global mean temperature data, the drought-flood data of the past 500 years in China, and the temperature time series of Shanghai, highlights the following: (1) the climatic wavelets depend on the hierarchies of a climate system; (2) for different time scales or hierarchies, a climate system may have different catastrophic points and periods; (3) for different time scales or hierarchies, variation of the Southern Hemisphere temperature has an obvious phase-lag compared with that of the Northern Hemisphere and the catastrophe points also lag behind; (4) in a cold-warm period, the cold semi-period of the Northern Hemisphere is obviously longer than the warm one; (5) for different hierarchies or time scales, there exists a phase-lag for the droughtflood variation in China moving gradually with latitude from north to south. Finally, a new technique of climate diagnosis, the phase curve of wavelets, is put forward in this paper.