Climate oscillation

A climate oscillation or climate cycle is any recurring cyclical oscillation within global or regional climate, and is a type of climate pattern. These fluctuations in atmospheric temperature, sea surface temperature, precipitation or other parameters can be quasi-periodic, often occurring on inter-annual, multi-annual, decadal, multidecadal, century-wide, millennial or longer timescales. They are not perfectly periodic and a Fourier analysis of the data does not give a sharp spectrum. A climate oscillation or climate cycle is any recurring cyclical oscillation within global or regional climate, and is a type of climate pattern. These fluctuations in atmospheric temperature, sea surface temperature, precipitation or other parameters can be quasi-periodic, often occurring on inter-annual, multi-annual, decadal, multidecadal, century-wide, millennial or longer timescales. They are not perfectly periodic and a Fourier analysis of the data does not give a sharp spectrum. A prominent example is the El Niño Southern Oscillation, involving sea surface temperatures along a stretch of the equatorial Central and East Pacific Ocean and the western coast of tropical South America, but which affects climate worldwide. Records of past climate conditions are recovered through geological examination of proxies, found in glacier ice, sea bed sediment, tree ring studies or otherwise. Many oscillations on different time-scales have been found or hypothesized. Here is a list of known or proposed climatic oscillations.: