Long-range persistence of temperature records induced by long-term climatic phenomena

The occurrence of persistence in climatic systems has been investigated by analyzing 1167 surface temperature records, covering 110 years, in the whole United States. Due to the nonlinear and nonstationary character of temperature time series, the seasonal cycle suffers from both phase and amplitude modulations, which are not properly removed by the classical definition of the temperature anomaly. In order to properly filter out the seasonal component and the monotonic trends, we define the temperature anomaly in a different way by using the empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The essence of this method is to empirically identify the intrinsic oscillatory modes from the temperature records according to their characteristic time scale. The original signal is thus decomposed into a collection of a finite small number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), having its own time scale and representing oscillations experiencing amplitude and phase modulations, and a residue, describing the mean trend. The sum of all the IMF components as well as the residue reconstructs the original signal. Partial reconstruction can be achieved by selectively choosing IMFs in order to remove trivial trends and noise. The EMD description in terms of time-dependent amplitude and phase functions overcomes one of the major limitation of the Fourier analysis, namely, a correct description of nonlinearities and nonstationarities. By using the EMD definition of temperature anomalies we found persistence of fluctuations with a different degree according to the geographical location, on time scales in the range 3-15 years. The spatial distribution of the detrended fluctuation analysis exponent, used to quantify the degree of memory, indicates that the long-term persistence could be related to to the presence of climatic regions, which are more sensitive to climatic phenomena such as the El Niño southern oscillation.