2022/05/01 by Albert Sneppen · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Climate variability and models #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #physics.ao-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02773-w
published as Published in European Physical Journal Plus, 2022 · 8 pages (with 6 figures) with 6 pages appendix
crossref issued 2022/05/01 · crossref published 2022/05/01 · crossref published-print 2022/05/01 · openalex publication_date 2022/05/01 · crossref published-online 2022/05/05 · crossref created 2022/05/05 · crossref deposited 2022/05/05 · arxiv created 2022/05/16 · arxiv updated 2022/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/06/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Both global, intermediate and local scales of Climate Change have been studied extensively, but a unified diagnostic framework for examining all spatial scales concurrently has remained elusive. Here we present a new tool-set using spherical harmonics to examine climate change through surface temperature anomalies from 1850 to 2021 on spatial scales ranging from planetary to 50 km scales. We show that the observed temperature anomalies are accurately decomposed in spherical harmonics typically within 0.05 K. This decomposition displays a remarkably simple dependence on spatial scale with a universal shape across seasons and decades. The decomposition separates two distinct regimes by a characteristic turnover-length of approximately 3000 km. The largest scales confirm established trends, while local fluctuations are consistent with 2-dimensional turbulence. We observe a downward cascade, from which it follows that climate change feeds increasing volatility on all spatial scales from 2.000 to 50 km. This increase is primarily driven by growing volatility along longitudes.