FUNDAMENTAL MODES OF ATMOSPHERIC CFC-11 FROM EMPIRICAL MODE DECOMPOSITION

摘要

Following an initial growth, the concentrations of chlorofluorocarbon-11 (CFC-11) in the atmosphere started to decline in the 1990's due to world-wide legislative control on emissions. The amplitude of the annual cycle of CFC-11 was much larger in the earlier period compared with that in the later period. We apply here the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) analysis to the CFC-11 data obtained by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The sum of the second and third intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) represents the annual cycle, which shows that the annual cycle of CFC-11 has varied by a factor of 2-3 from the mid-1970's to the present over polar regions. The results provide an illustration of the power of the EEMD method in extracting a variable annual cycle from data dominated by increasing and decreasing trends. Finally, we compare the annual cycle obtained by the EEMD analysis to that obtained using conventional methods such as Fourier transforms and running averages.