A MULTI-STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE SOUTHERN OSCILLATION (SO) AND ITS RELATION TO THE MEAN MONTHLY ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION AT 500 hPa IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE

In this paper the correlation analysis, factor analysis, fuzzy classification, and principal component analysis (PCA) are performed for the southern oscillation index (SOI) from the Climate Analysis Center (CAC) at the NOAA. It is shown that the 12-month SOI can be classified into two groups: one from January through April and the other from May through December. They differ in persistency and correlation. It is also found that the year of strong or weak SO can be defined by the first principal component of the SOI. The 11 years of weak SO thus defined contain 9 El Nino events.In addition, the relations between the SOI and 500 hPa geopotential height, mean monthly zonal height, mean monthly interzonal height differences, centers of atmospheric activities, characteristics of the atmospheric circulation (the intensity index of the north polar vortex, the area index of the subtropical West Pacific high, mean monthly zonal and meridional circulation indexes in Asia and Eurasia) in the period of 24 months from January through December of the next year have been examined on the basis of the monthly data from 1951 through 1984. The correlation coefficients and Mahalanobis distances are thus presented. Analysis indicates that in the early part of the low SOI year, i.e., in April, the 500 hPa geopotential height north of 75oN is significantly low and then becomes higher in May. It is found that in April the trough of the first harmonic wave is in the Eastern Hemisphere and the contribution of its variance is smaller than in May. Analysis shows that the opposite is true in the high SOI year. Such variation in the height field during the April-May period is an early signal of the SO at higher latitudes.In the end, a statistical prediction model for the SOI is presented, by means of which a low SOI year as well as an El Nino event has been successfully predicted for 1986.