Reconstruction of the dynamics of the climatic system from time-series data.
The oxygen isotope record of the last million years, as provided by a deep sea core sediment, is analyzed by a method recently developed in the theory of dynamical systems. The analysis suggests that climatic variability is the manifestation of a chaotic dynamics described by an attractor of fractal dimensionality. A quantitative measure of the limited predictability of the climatic system is provided by the evaluation of the time-correlation function and the largest positive Lyapounov exponent of the system.
Institut d'Aéronomie Spatiale de Belgique, Avenue Circulaire, 3, 1180 Bruxelles, Belgium.
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