A possible relationship between the Arctic Oscillation Index and atmosphere-triggered interannual long-wavelength

A host of geophysical processes contribute to temporal variations
in the low-degree zonal harmonics of the Earth’s gravity field. The present paper
focuses on atmosphere-based mass redistributions using global surface pressure data
from the NOAA Climate Diagnostics Center for the period 1980-2002. We computed
atmosphere-triggered temporal variations of the Earth’s low-degree zonal gravitational
coefficients Jl (l = 2 : 4). Such atmosphere-triggered ΔJl(t) are compared
with the Arctic Oscillation Index (AOI) and with the observed ΔJl(t) computed by
the Italian Space Agency (ASI) so as to investigate a possible coupling. We show
that there is a significant agreement between the AOI and atmosphere-triggered
ΔJl(t), as well as a particularly interesting correlation between the winter ΔJl(t)
series and the AOI active season series.

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