CLIMATE PATTERNS: ORIGIN and FORCING

This brief review described spatial-time climate patterns generated by the dy- namics and thermodynamics of the Earth’s climate system and methods of identifying these patterns. Specifically it does discuss the following major cli- mate patterns: El Nin˜o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Cold Ocean–Warm Land (COWL) pattern, Northern and Southern Annular Patterns (NAM and SAM), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and Atlantic Meridional Overturn- ing Crculation (AMOC), Pacific North-American Pattern (PNA) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation Pattern (PDO). In view of an extensive number of publi- cations on some climate patterns, such as the ENSO, which discussed in many hundred of publications, this review is not intended to cover all the details of individual climate patterns but intends only to give a general overview of their structure, mechanisms of their formation and response to external forcing. It is assumed that the climate patterns can be treated as attractors of dynamical systems allowing us to extract and predict some specific features of the patterns such as the origin and evolution of the climate patterns and their role in the climate change. Thus the knowledge of patterns allows the climate prediction on long time scales and understanding of how an external forcing affects the frequency of occurrence of climate patterns and their magnitude but not the spatial structure.