English

Comment on "Scaling of atmosphere and ocean temperature correlations in observations and climate models"

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics 2009-11-10 v2 Statistical Mechanics Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

In a recent letter [K. Fraedrich and R. Blender, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 108501 (2003)], Fraedrich and Blender studied the scaling of atmosphere and ocean temperature. They analyzed the fluctuation functions F(s) ~ s^alpha of monthly temperature records (mostly from grid data) by using the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA2) and claim that the scaling exponent alpha over the inner continents is equal to 0.5, being characteristic of uncorrelated random sequences. Here we show that this statement is (i) not supported by their own analysis and (ii) disagrees with the analysis of the daily observational data from which the grid monthly data have been derived. We conclude that also for the inner continents, the exponent is between 0.6 and 0.7, similar as for the coastline-stations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/0305080,
  title  = {Comment on "Scaling of atmosphere and ocean temperature correlations in observations and climate models"},
  author = {Armin Bunde and Jan F. Eichner and Shlomo Havlin and Eva Koscielny-Bunde and Hans J. Schellnhuber and Dmitry Vjushin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0305080},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

1 page with 2 figures