Description

Our climate is governed by a combination of processes across a vast spectrum of spatial and temporal scales. Just like in the food chain, these climatic processes are in constant competition - sometimes they benefit each other and sometimes they destroy each other. But most frequently, they feed off each other. Just as a large ocean wave can grow from the energy of several smaller waves; several smaller waves can spawn from the demise of a larger wave.

While we might view the outcomes of these competitions as ordinary, they are anything but. Some processes start on scales that are imperceptible to us, they evolve into the weather patterns we experience every day, then into climate, and then they sometimes evolve into phenomena that we can never directly experience.

This figure shows the individual importance of the processes that make up climate (bottom) to the mean climate (top). This way, we can identify which process contributed the most to the climate behavior at a given time.