Emergence of Chaos in the Tropical Atmosphere: Study of the Weak Temperature Gradient System

The atmospheric tropical belt is believed to be more predictable than the extratropics. This question is revisited here by exploring the emergence of chaos in reduced-order model versions of the vorticity equation under the weak temperature gradient hypothesis, which provides a good description of the large-scale tropical atmosphere. The analysis reveals that under fairly realistic divergence forcing amplitudes, chaos may emerge, sometimes with Lyapunov time scales of less than a day. This result contrasts with the idea of a predictable tropical atmosphere, and opens important questions on the effective origin of predictability in the Tropics.