Persistence of daily geopotential heights over the Southern Hemisphere.

Abstract

An analysis has been made of the persistence of geopotential heights at 1000 and 500 mb over the Southern Hemisphere for both summer and winter seasons. The focus is on lagged autocorrelations, T0 the effective time between independent samples, and low order autoregressive (AR) models fit to the data. Smallest T0 values are found over the southern oceans and especially in the main storm track regions where developing synoptic systems and rapid advection contribute to reduce the autocorrelations and T0 values. -from Author