El Nino on the Devil's Staircase: Annual Subharmonic Steps to Chaos.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 17778135.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
The source of irregularity in El Niño, the large interannual climate variation of the Pacific ocean-atmosphere system, has remained elusive. Results from an El Niño model exhibit transition to chaos through a series of frequency-locked steps created by nonlinear resonance with the Earth's annual cycle. The overlapping of these resonances leads to the chaotic behavior. This transition scenario explains a number of climate model results and produces spectral characteristics consistent with currently available data.