GOAPP Discussion Group, January 31, 2008

Location: Gordon Riley Conference Room, Department of Oceanography, 3rd Floor LSC

Time: 11:30am-1:00pm

Title: Modes of Variability of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system: Redundancy analysis of global sea surface temperature and air pressure

Discussion Leader: Faez Bakalian

Abstract:

An exploratory statistical analysis of the covariance structure of joint atmosphere-ocean variables is carried out on global scales. The ultimate goal is to better describe the background error covariance structure needed for the joint assimilation of the atmosphere and ocean observations into the coupled system. Two main statistical tools have been used: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Redundancy Analysis (RA). The data sets are joint global fields of sea surface temperature and sea level pressure from (i) an NCEP reanalysis and (ii) coupled model output of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis. The limitations of PCA in terms of identifying causal relationships are discussed and it is argued that more informative results may be obtained from RA. Several RAs are undertaken to explore the effect of sea surface temperature from specific geographic regions on the global atmospheric circulation.