Global and Planetary Change 18 1998.

7984

Interannual polar motion with relation to the North Atlantic

Oscillation
a,)
Yonghong Zhou , Dawei Zheng a , Ming Zhao a , Benjamin Fong Chao b

a
Shanghai Obseratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200030, China
b
Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
Received 19 August 1996; accepted 29 September 1997

Abstract

The North Atlantic Oscillation NAO. is an interannual, northsouth seesaw in the atmosphere and ocean. The associated
motion and mass redistribution will inevitably cause variations in the Earths polar motion. The present paper studies the
relation of NAO with interannual polar motion. Two monthly series for the period of 19641994 are employed: the NAO
index NAOI., which is used as a proxy to measure the intensity of NAO, and the polar motion series. The latter is further
processed to obtain the interannual polar motion excitation function c by deconvolution and subsequent removal of the drift,
the seasonal terms and short period variations. The time-domain cross correlation and frequency-domain coherence studies
show significant correlations between NAOI and c , especially on the x-component of c as anticipated from the general
pattern of NAO. This suggests possible significant contribution of NAO in exciting interannual polar motion. q 1998
Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: North Atlantic Oscillation; interannual polar motion; northsouth seesaw

1. Introduction the Earths free oscillation, which undergoes com-

The motion of Earths instantaneous rotation pole
with respect to the Earths crust is briefly referred to
as the polar motion. The polar motion is mainly
characterized by the periodic terms of 12 months and
14 months, i.e., the annual and Chandler polar mo-
tion. The annual polar motion is a forced wobble,
primarily driven by the motion and seasonal mass
redistribution of atmosphere, oceans and under-
ground water; whereas the Chandler polar motion is
)
Corresponding author.
plex interaction of the Earths inner and outer damp-
ing and excitation factors Lambeck, 1980.. The
polar motion has attracted significant attention, not
only because it is an important geodetic problem but
also because it is thought to have significant value as
a global measure of variations within the hydro-
sphere, atmosphere, cryosphere and solid Earth Wil-
son and Haubrich, 1976; Wahr, 1983; Wu and Peltier,
1984; Chao, 1993; Trupin, 1993.. Observation of
polar motion might be an indirect way of monitoring
some aspects of global change. With increase of data
accumulation and observation accuracy after the
1980s, research began to focus on the polar motion
on subseasonal, interannual, and decadal time scales

0921-8181r98r$19.00 q 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

PII S 0 9 2 1 - 8 1 8 1 9 8 . 0 0 0 0 8 - 3
80 Y. Zhou et al.r Global and Planetary Change 18 (1998) 7984
Salstein and Rosen, 1989; Kuehne et al., 1993;
Abarca and Cazenave, 1994..
The North Atlantic Oscillation NAO., first iden-
tified by Sir Gilbert Walker 1932., is dominantly a
northsouth interannual pressure seesaw in the mid-
dle-latitude North Atlantic Ocean. It can be charac-
terized by two relationships of strong statistical sig-
nificance: i. a negative correlation between the
severity of winters in the GreenlandLabrador re-
gion and northwestern Europe; and ii. a negative
correlation between sea level pressure in the vicinity
of the Icelandic low near 658N and a broad eastwest
belt centered near 408N. The schematic pattern is
given in Fig. 1, after Wallace and Gutzier 1981..
According to the documentation, NAO is closely
related to the anomaly patterns in the midtropo-
spheric circulation, sea-surface temperature, sea level,
sea ice drift and precipitation Rogers, 1984; Barn-
ston and Livezey, 1987., and hence associated with
large-scale atmosphericoceanic motion and mass
transport. Based on the conservation of total angular
momentum of the solid Earthoceanatmosphere
system, any motion and mass redistribution of atmo-
sphere and oceans is accompanied by variations in
the Earths rotation. Therefore, the present paper
studies the correlation of NAO with interannual po-
lar motion.
Fig. 1. The schematic pattern of the North Atlantic Oscillation
after Wallace and Gutzier, 1981..
2. Basic theory and data preparation
Polar motion is a two-dimensional quantity, usu-
ally expressed in terms of the complex function
m s m x q im y , where m x and m y are components
along the Greenwich Meridian and the 908E longi-
tude, respectively. The equation of motion governing
the excitation of polar motion is as follows Lambeck,
1980.:
m q irs 0 . m
sc 1.
where c is the polar motion excitation function,
c s c x q i c y , s 0 is the complex Chandler fre-
quency, given by s 0 s 2p 1 y ir2Q .rT0 ; T0 is the
observed Chandler period, and Q the damping fac-
tor.
In this paper the pole94 monthly series during
19641994 is used for m; it is obtained through a
Kalman filter combination of measurements taken by
modern space-geodetic techniques and optical as-
trometry Gross, 1995.. Adopting T0 of 435 solar
days and Q value of 100 Wilson and Haubrich,
1976., the observed polar motion excitation func-
tions can be deduced according to Eq. 1.. It contains
signals which have little interest here: a slow drift
and strong seasonal terms. We remove them by
subtracting out the least-squares fit of a linear com-
bination of tendency, annual and semiannual terms.
We further pass the series through a Butterworth
lowpass filter of order 2, in both forward and reverse
directions to eliminate any phase distortion Wiley,
1979.. The cutoff frequency is 0.67 cycle per year
cpy.. The final series for the interannual c x and c y
are shown as the top two curves in Fig. 2.
NAO is one of the major global great meteorolog-
ical circulation anomalies. Relevant and relatively
complete observations have been available for
decades. The intensity of NAO is customarily mea-
sured in terms of certain indices constructed from
sea surface temperature, sea level air. pressure, or
height field Walker and Bliss, 1932; Van Loon and
Rogers, 1978; Wallace and Gutzier, 1981; Barnston
and Livezey, 1987; Wallace et al., 1993; Kushnir,
1994.. The North Atlantic Oscillation Index NAOI.
for 19641994 used in the present study is derived
from orthogonally-rotated principal component anal-
ysis of Northern Hemisphere 1-month mean of 700-
mb heights. We subject the NAOI to the similar
 Y. Zhou et al.r Global and Planetary Change 18 (1998) 7984
Fig. 2. Interannual polar motion excitation function and the North Atlantic Oscillation Index during 19641994.
numerical processing as that for c . The result is
shown at the bottom of Fig. 2.
3. Analyses and results
The cross-correlation function r t . between two
time series x 1 t . and x 2 t . is a customary measure
of their relationship in the time domain. It is defined
as Jenkins and Watts, 1968.:
r t . s s 12 t . r s 11 s 22 .
1r2
where s 12 t . is the cross covariance function of lag
t , and s 11 and s 22 are the variances of x 1 t . and
x 2 t ., respectively. The value of r t . lies between
y1 and q1.
The complex coherence spectrum R f . between
two time series x 1 t . and x 2 t . is a normalized
measure of their correlation in the frequency domain.
It is defined as:
1r2
R f . s S12 f . r S11 f . S22 f . .
where f is the frequency, S12 f . is the cross-power
spectrum of x 1 t . and x 2 t ., and S11 f . and S22 f .
81
are the autopower spectra of x 1 t . and x 2 t ., respec-
tively. Letting
g2 f . s < R f . < 2
4.
w f . s arg R f .
g 2 f . and w f . are called the squared coherence
spectrum and the coherence phase spectrum, respec-
tively.
The power spectra are usually estimated by the
discrete Fourier transform. Thomason 1982. first
2. introduced the multitaper analysis technique, i.e.,
some windows are added to the time series prior to
the Fourier transformation. Although degrading the
spectral resolution, it greatly reduces the spectral
leakage and hence gives more reliable spectral esti-
mates. Seven orthogonal eigentapers with time-band-
width product of 4p were employed in this present
paper.
We first analyze in the time domain in the correla-
tion between interannual polar motion excitation
function and the NAOI. The cross-correlation func-
3. tions of c x and c y with NAOI are plotted in Fig. 3.
It shows that the cross-correlation function has a
clear peak value of 0.47, a 4-month phase lead of
82 Y. Zhou et al.r Global and Planetary Change 18 (1998) 7984

Fig. 3. The solid and dash lines are cross-correlation functions of the x-component and y-component of interannual polar motion excitation
function with the North Atlantic Oscillation Index, respectively.

Fig. 4. wa., b.x and wc., d.x represent the coherence spectra of x-component and y-component of interannual polar motion excitation
function with the North Atlantic Oscillation Index, respectively. The horizontal dash line indicates 95% confidence threshold for the squared
coherence spectrum.
 Y. Zhou et al.r Global and Planetary Change 18 (1998) 7984
NAOI relative to c x , whereas between NAOI and c y
also has a peak of near-zero phase lag but of rela-
tively lower value. To determine the statistical signif-
icance, a Monte Carlo simulation is employed under
same condition as that of c and NAOI Li, 1996..
The result shows the significance level of 95%, 90%
for the c x NAOI and c y NAOI correlations, re-
spectively.
Further analysis is made in frequency domain. We
apply fast Fourier transform and combine multi-taper
technique, to compute the squared coherence spectra
g 2 f . Fig. 4a,c. and the coherence phase spectra
w f . Fig. 4b,d. of c x and c y with NAOI. Fig. 4
shows that a significant portion of the interannual
frequency band sees coherency exceeding or approx-
imating the 95% threshold of 0.39 Chao, 1988.,
confirming the time-domain correlation found in Fig.
3. It is worth pointing out that g 2 f . between c x
and NAOI at frequencies around 0.5 cpy are low,
and corresponding coherence phases change rapidly;
the similar behavior also exists between c y and
NAOI. They suggest the possible effect on polar
motion of the atmospheric Quasi-Biennial Oscilla-
tion QBO..
4. Discussions and conclusions
The present paper investigates the relationship of
interannual polar motion with the NAO. The signifi-
cant correlations between them suggest that NAO is
possibly an important excitation source to interan-
nual polar motion.
The polar motion excitation factors include mass
redistribution, relative motion and torques. The exci-
tation of NAO to polar motion comes mainly from
the first term, which pertains to the spherical har-
monic component cos l q isin l.sin2 u , where l and
u are the east longitude and latitude, respectively. As
the NAO locates mainly in the vicinity of the 08
longitude, its polarmolar excitation projects largely
onto the x-component. This is consistent with the
finding that most of the correlation between NAOI
and c exists with c x .
The apparent phase differences in Fig. 3 are only
empirical: they simply indicate the fact that the
NAOI that we use leads c y by 4 months and lags
83
the c y by less than 1 month. As stated earlier, other
meteorological. indices have been constructed to
measure the strength of NAO. They are all highly
correlated and reflect different aspects in the evolu-
tion of NAO. Had we adopted other constructs of
NAOI, the phase differences would be somewhat
different.
Fig. 4 implies that there are other geophysical
factors which may excite interannual polar motion.
Like the NAO, the well-known El NinorSouthern
Oscillation ENSO. also demonstrates primary vari-
ability on interannual time scales, and is associated
with large-scale mass transport. But unlike NAO,
ENSO is dominantly a westeast seasaw Rasmus-
son and Carpenter, 1982. and hence shows some
different characteristics with respect to its influence
on polar motion. In further studies, we will combine
the effects of large scale atmospheric and oceanic
motions such as the ENSO and atmospheric QBO, so
as to thoroughly explain interannual polar motion
excitation.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following people for their
support in the data collection: Dr. R.S. Gross Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, USA. for the pole94 polar
motion data; Dr. B. Gerry National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Bureau, USA. and Dr. J.P. Mao Mary-
land University, USA. for the NAO Index series. We
have also benefited from comments by Dr. A.B.
Pittock. This work is supported by the National
Natural Science Foundation of China and NASA
Geophysics Program, USA.
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