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Description
All aspects of human life are, directly or indirectly, affected by climatic processes. This effect is especially noticeable in such fields as agriculture, irrigation, economy, telecommunications, transportation, traffic, air pollution and military industries (Haltiner & Williams 1980). A number of researchers have studied the possibility of forecasting rainfall several months in advance using climate indices such as SOI, PDOI and NPI (e.g. Silverman and Dracup 2000). A well-known atmospheric phenomenon is the Southern Oscillation (SO). The SO is an atmospheric see-saw process in the tropical Pacific sea level pressure between the eastern and western hemispheres associated with the El Niño and La Niña oceanographic features. The oscillation can be characterized by a simple index, the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). (Kawamura et al., 1998). The Pacific Decadal Oscillation index (PDOI) is the leading principal component of monthly sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the North Pacific Ocean north of 20°N (Zhang et al., 1997; Mantua et al., 1997). Trenberth and Hurrell (1994) have defined the North Pacific Index (NPI) as the area-weighted sea level pressure over the region 30°N to 65°N, 160°E to 140°W to measure the decadal variations of atmosphere and ocean in the north Pacific.
ISBN
978-953-51-0095-9
Publisher
InTech
Publication Date
3-2012
Keywords
Modern Climatology, whole system, historical statistics, variability, atmosphere, prediction
Disciplines
Climate | Earth Sciences
Comments
This book originally published by InTech. Publisher's version may be found here: http://www.intechopen.com/books/modern-climatology Physical copies of this work are also available on the publisher's website. Please use publishers recommended citation.