Extraction of a weak climatic signal by an ecosystem

Arnold H. Taylor (), J. Icarus Allen and Paul A. Clark
Additional contact information
Arnold H. Taylor: Plymouth Marine Laboratory
J. Icarus Allen: Plymouth Marine Laboratory
Paul A. Clark: University of Sussex

Nature, 2002, vol. 416, issue 6881, 629-632

Abstract: Abstract The complexity of ecosystems can cause subtle1 and chaotic responses to changes in external forcing2. Although ecosystems may not normally behave chaotically3, sensitivity to external influences associated with nonlinearity can lead to amplification of climatic signals. Strong correlations between an El Niño index and rainfall and maize yield in Zimbabwe have been demonstrated4; the correlation with maize yield was stronger than that with rainfall. A second example is the 100,000-year ice-age cycle, which may arise from a weak cycle in radiation through its influence on the concentration of atmospheric CO2 (ref. 5). Such integration of a weak climatic signal has yet to be demonstrated in a realistic theoretical system. Here we use a particular climatic phenomenon—the observed association between plankton populations around the UK and the position of the Gulf Stream6,7—as a probe to demonstrate how a detailed marine ecosystem model extracts a weak signal that is spread across different meteorological variables. Biological systems may therefore respond to climatic signals other than those that dominate the driving variables.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/416629a Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:416:y:2002:i:6881:d:10.1038_416629a

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/416629a

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().