Prof. Stéphane Vannitsem
Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium
Room 1218

10am, July 11, 2019

The long-term predictability in two different versions of the Modular Arbitrary Order Ocean- Atmosphere Model (MAOOAM) developed at the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, is explored with emphasis on the role of the surface friction on the development of low-frequency variability within the atmosphere. Both versions differ by the specific geometry chosen for the ocean (closed or open boundaries in the zonal direction). Two routes to long-term predictability within the atmosphere are found with different phase space characteristics: (i) a chaotic wandering around an unstable periodic orbit in the case of the closed ocean basin, or a succession of erratic excursions closed to an unstable periodic orbit in the case of the open ocean basin. The implications of these different behaviors and their relations with the actual coupled ocean-atmosphere dynamics will be discussed.

Stéphane Vannitsem is the head of the Dynamical Meteorology and Climatology Unit of the Research division of the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, and lecturer at the Free University of Brussels. He is currently chair of the Nonlinear Processes division of the European Geophysical Union and executive editor of the journal “Nonlinear processes in Geophysics”. His main research interests and expertise are oriented toward the application and adaptation of techniques of dynamical systems theory, chaos theory and stochastic processes to the study of atmospheric and climate dynamics with emphasis on their variability and predictability.