ON THE STRUCTURE OF ATTRACTOR DESCRIBED B Y EQUATIONS OF BAROTROPIC ATMOSPHERE

It is well known that local instability of nonlinear dissipative syste ms could lead to chaotic behavior of their trajectories. Estimations o f predictability for such systems is one of the most important problem s addressed in numerical investigations. As far as atmospheric motion seems to be chaotic, the problem is also of interest in the atmospheri c dynamic context. Various approaches to compute Lyapunov exponents, K olmogorov's entropy and the attractor dimension for low-order barotrop ic model of the atmosphere were investigated and compared in the paper . The relationships between Kolmogorov's and informational intropy wer e considered also. The unstable equilibria points were shown to have a n important influence on the attractor structure and the system behavi or. Relationships between the mean time the trajectory spend in the ne ighborhood of stationary point and stability characteristics of the eq uilibrium were analyzed.