NATURE | VOL 419 | 12 SEPTEMBER 2002 | www.nature.com/nature 207 The world ocean is one of the main constituents of the climate system and affects climate in a multitude of ways. Its sheer size is obvious: 71% of the Earth is covered by ocean, so that most of the solar radiation received at the Earth’s surface goes into the ocean and warms the surface waters. As a result of its heat capacity an...

This study contributes to a better understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of ecosystem dynamics in Southern Africa in response to climatic variability. First, we identified the areas where NDVI is covarying with precipitation, and where rainfall anomalies are correlated with NDVI anomalies. The results suggest that these correlations are related to quasi-periodicities in rainfall pa...

The overall objective is to use diagnostic and modeling methods to decipher and understand physical processes/causal links that connect tropical and North Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) variations associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) to changes in atmospheric circulation and warm season precipitation regimes for North America. The ultimate goal is to include repre...

The dynamics of our environment are, in general, characterized by complex patterns which evolve in space and time, such as circulation patterns in the oceans, weather patterns in the atmosphere and biodiversity patterns in the biosphere. The methodology of dynamical systems theory is focused, on the one hand, on characterizing spatio-temporal patterns and, on the other hand, on studying transit...

Abstract The spatial distribution of summer rainfall anomalies over eastern China often shows a tripole pattern with the Yangtze River basin varies in opposite phase North and South China. It is not clear whether this an intrinsic atmospheric mode or it remotely forced. Using two sets model outputs from 20 models participating 5 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), paper investigates ...