Global properties and local structure of the weather attractor over Western Europe

An analysis of the West European climate over short time scales is performed by means of time series of the 500 mb geopotential height at nine different meteorological stations. The characterization of the dynamics is based on the computation of the dimensions of manifolds on which the systems evolve. For this purpose several embedding techniques are used and compared. All methods give similar results, namely, that the data in different stations seem to derive from a single dynamical system of a few degrees of freedom possessing a low-dimensional attractor. The authors have estimated some average properties of the attractor such as its dimension and the dominant Lyapounov exponents. Furthermore, they have explored its local structure and found a relation between the rate of divergence on it and the corresponding heights of geopotential.