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The impact of inter-annual variability of annual cycle on long-term persistence of surface air temperature in long historical records

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Abstract

Previous studies in the literature show that the annual cycle of surface air temperature (SAT) is changing in both amplitude and phase, and the SAT departures from the annual cycle are long-term correlated. However, the classical definition of temperature anomalies is based on the assumption that the annual cycle is constant, which contradicts the fact of changing annual cycle. How to quantify the impact of the changing annual cycle on the long-term correlation of temperature anomaly variability still remains open. In this paper, a recently developed data adaptive analysis tool, the nonlinear mode decomposition (NMD), is used to extract and remove time-varying annual cycle to reach the new defined temperature anomalies in which time-dependent amplitude of annual cycle has been considered. By means of detrended fluctuation analysis, the impact induced by inter-annual variability from the time-dependent amplitude of annual cycle has been quantified on the estimation of long-term correlation of long historical temperature anomalies in Europe. The results show that the classical climatology annual cycle is supposed to lack inter-annual fluctuation which will lead to a maximum artificial deviation centering around 600 days. This maximum artificial deviation is crucial to defining the scaling range and estimating the long-term persistence exponent accurately. Selecting different scaling range could lead to an overestimation or underestimation of the long-term persistence exponent. By using NMD method to extract the inter-annual fluctuations of annual cycle, this artificial crossover can be weakened to extend a wider scaling range with fewer uncertainties.

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Acknowledgements

This study is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41675049).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lab for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Qimin Deng, Da Nian & Zuntao Fu

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  1. Qimin Deng
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  2. Da Nian
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  3. Zuntao Fu
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Correspondence to Zuntao Fu.

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Deng, Q., Nian, D. & Fu, Z. The impact of inter-annual variability of annual cycle on long-term persistence of surface air temperature in long historical records. Clim Dyn 50, 1091–1100 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3662-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3662-5

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