Universal Spectrum for Interannual Variability of Rainfall Over India and Scotland: Implication for Prediction

Abstract

Atmospheric flows exhibit fluctuations of all scales (space -time) ranging from turbulence (millimeters-seconds) to climate (thousands of kilometers-years). The apparently random fluctuations however exhibit long-range spatio-temporal correlations manifested as the selfsimilar fractal geometry to the global cloud cover pattern concomitant with inverse power law form for power spectra of temporal fluctuations . Long-range spatiotemporal correlations are ubiquitous to dynamical systems in nature and are recently identified as signatures of self-organized criticality . Traditional meteorological theory cannot explain satisfactorily the observed selforganized criticality in atmospheric flows . This paper gives a summary of an alternative non-deterministic cell dynamical systems model for atmospheric flows which predicts the observed self-organized criticality as intrinsic to quantumlike mechanics governing flow dynamics.