
TL;DR
This paper introduces a spherical harmonics-based framework to analyze climate change across all spatial scales, revealing a universal pattern and increased volatility driven by longitudes from planetary to local levels.
Contribution
It presents a novel unified diagnostic tool using spherical harmonics to analyze climate change across multiple spatial scales simultaneously.
Findings
Temperature anomalies decompose accurately within 0.05 K
Universal shape of scale dependence across seasons and decades
Climate change induces increased volatility on all scales from 2,000 to 50 km
Abstract
Both global, intermediate and local scales of Climate Change have been studied extensively, but a unified diagnostic framework for examining all spatial scales concurrently has remained elusive. Here we present a new tool-set using spherical harmonics to examine climate change through surface temperature anomalies from 1850 to 2021 on spatial scales ranging from planetary to km scales. We show that the observed temperature anomalies are accurately decomposed in spherical harmonics typically within 0.05 K. This decomposition displays a remarkably simple dependence on spatial scale with a universal shape across seasons and decades. The decomposition separates two distinct regimes by a characteristic turnover-length of approximately km. The largest scales confirm established trends, while local fluctuations are consistent with 2-dimensional turbulence. We observe a downward…
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