HR: 0800h
AN: NG11A-0167    [Abstracts]
TI: Using a dynamical systems approach to characterize climate for physical interpretation and comparison of models to observations
AU: * Newman, D E
EM: ffden@uaf.edu
AF: Physics Department/CNSM Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, Reichardt Building, Fairbanks, AK 99775, United States
AU: Bhatt, U
EM: bhatt@gi.alaska.edu
AF: GI/Atmospheric Science Program CNSM Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, 903 Koyukuk Dr., Fairbanks, AK 99775, United States
AU: Polyakov, I
EM: igor@iarc.uaf.edu
AF: IARC Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, 903 Koyukuk Dr., Fairbanks, AK 99775, United States
AU: Sanchez, R
EM: sanchezferlr@ornl.gov
AF: Fusion Energy Division Oak Ridge National Lab, P.O. Box 2008, MS 6169, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6169, United States
AU: Wackerbauer, R
EM: ffraw1@uaf.edu
AF: Physics Department/CNSM Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, Reichardt Building, Fairbanks, AK 99775, United States
AB: Complex geophysical systems such as the climate need many measures to properly characterize their state and dynamics. This is needed both to understand the physical processes in the system and to enable realistic comparison with models. Now that the IPCC fourth assessment is finished, the next step is to use this type of comparison to carefully scrutinize our models and evaluate the key processes that we need to improve for the next generation of climate models. To this end, we apply a variety of tools from a dynamical systems approach that are designed to probe the "temporal dynamics" inherent in a time series and the PDFs of these series. These methods provide additional information than what can be obtained from our standard set of climate evaluation methods. Hurst's R/S analysis is one such method that is able to detect differences in the ordering of the time series and make the correlations hidden within them apparent. We will present results that evaluate a suite of CCSM3 simulations and observations using R/S analysis and a range of other techniques to determine to what extent the model captures the long-term dynamics of the real climate systems. We will also look at the applicability of the standard diffusion model for parameterization in these models.
DE: 0550 Model verification and validation
DE: 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513)
DE: 1626 Global climate models (3337, 4928)
DE: 3270 Time series analysis (1872, 4277, 4475)
DE: 4475 Scaling: spatial and temporal (1872, 3270, 4277)
SC: Nonlinear Geophysics [NG]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting