A. Hannachi et B. Legras, SIMULATED ANNEALING AND WEATHER REGIMES CLASSIFICATION, Tellus. Series A, Dynamic meteorology and oceanography, 47(5), 1995, pp. 955-973
A new approach based on the travelling salesman problem and simulated
annealing is used to classify weather maps and to associate them with
weather regimes. The usual classification methods are able to identify
the preferred patterns of large-scale atmospheric flow. They fail, ho
wever, in characterizing the boundaries of various regimes which are g
enerally a result of the geometrical constraints imposed by the chosen
method. The method is aimed at overcoming this difficulty and helping
to define the boundaries between weather regimes in order to study th
e characteristics of and transitions between these regimes. Weather re
gimes are derived from a series of 37 winters of 700 hPa geopotential
height observations using the algorithm developed by Vautard (1990). T
he new approach is then applied to assign each observation to its corr
esponding weather regime. It is shown that the method provides results
which agree with the literature and helps to establish recurrence in
agreement with observations. We then, speculate on the relationship wh
ich may link the boundaries of weather regimes to the transitions betw
een these regimes.