scostep 2010 (stp12) - Leibniz-Institut für Atmosphärenphysik an der ...

STP12 Abstracts
Berlin, 12 - 16 July 2010
SCOSTEP Symposium 2010
Investigating the Influence of Solar Activity on the Arctic Polar Stratosphere using
Nonlinear Statistical Methods
Blume Christian 1 , Matthes Katja 2 , Horenko Illia 3
1 Institute for Meteorology, FU Berlin, 2 GFZ Potsdam and Institute for Meteorology, FU Berlin, 3
Institute of Computational Science, University of Lugano
A number of observational and modeling studies have shown that solar variability influences
the radiation, chemistry and dynamics of the atmosphere. However, the detection of possible
nonlinear interactions between the solar cycle and other atmospheric forcing factors such as
the QBO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation or the northern annual mode and their impacts
remains a difficult task. The main focus is on the influence of solar variations on the Arctic
polar stratospheric vortex in reanalysis data as well as chemistry climate model output. In
contrast to common linear statistical methods, this analysis aims at extracting nonlinear
impacts of solar cycle variations via a neural network approach and a novel clustering
method. The results are compared to commonly used linear methods.