Chapter 12 Further Reading improvements #3
Description
The story of "Climate attractors", which is discussed in Sect. 12.3.2 has more meat to it than we attribute to it in our Further reading sections. Worth noting is particularly:
- Tsonis, A. A., Elsner, J. B., & Georgakakos, K. P. (1993). Estimating the Dimension of Weather and Climate Attractors: Important Issues about the Procedure and Interpretation. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 50(15), 2549–2555. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1993)050<2549:ETDOWA>2.0.CO;2 , which summarizes a bit the story and the problems.
- Badin, G., & Domeisen, D. I. V. (2014). A Search for chaotic behavior in Northern Hemisphere stratospheric variability. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 71(4), 1494–1507. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-13-0225.1 , which summarises the story much better and gives an apparently completely list of the arguments, counter arguments, and counters to the counter arguments.
Something we don't mention, but we should, is that there have been raised counter arguments to the original rebuttals by Grassberger-Procaccia, saying that in fact the limit of datapoints is much lower than what originally thought of. This is discussed in the Tsonis reference. Unfortunately, I've read the paper, but I remain unconvinced, because it uses a logically flawed circular argument to claim "smaller amount of points necessary". Still, we must be as transparent as possible.
Furthermore, what Badin and Domeisen argue, and what Lorenz already argued in 1991 (reference cited in chapter 12), is that while it may not make sense to try to estimate the dimension of a "climate attractor", it could be possible to estimate such a dimension for a somewhat isolated climate subsystem.