Consistency of climatic changes at different time scales in Central England and Greenland

Abstract

Characteristic variations in the Greenland isotope temperature data over the last 1000 years and in the meteorological temperature measurements collected from Central England during the past four centuries have been analyzed. We take advantage of the continuous wavelet transform to analyze the simultaneous occurrence of temperature variations of different time scales. We assess the extent to which these phenomena can be compared when examining two different northern hemisphere locations at different time scales. Among the long-term variations, we focus on the cooling at the turn of the 18th century, which occurred slightly later in Greenland than in central England, and the warming observed at present. On the short time scale, the range under study is limited to times of the order of 5-10 years. It has been found that it is on these scales that temperature variations in the two locations are relatively consistent, with a cross-correlation coefficient as high as 0.6 for timescales of the order of 9 years. The main solar activity cycle also falls within the interval of significant correlations. It is shown that despite the absence of direct correlation between temperature and solar activity, the time dependence of the wavelet cross-correlation coefficient of the two temperature series on the scale of 11 years reproduces the long-term variations of solar activity.