TESTING FOR NONLINEARITY IN WEATHER RECORDS

Daily records of atmospheric surface pressure, temperature and geopote ntial heights of 500 hPa isobaric level were tested for nonlinearity, the necessary condition for deterministic chaos, using redundancy and surrogate data techniques. While the time series of the temperature an d the geopotential heights were found indiscernible to be from corresp ondent isospectral linear stochastic processes, a significant nonlinea r component was detected in the dynamics of the pressure recording, ho wever, no specific signatures of low-dimensional chaos were manifest.