Li-Yorke chaos in nonautonomous Hopf bifurcation patterns - I.

We analyze the characteristics of the global attractor of a type of dissipative nonautonomous dynamical systems in terms of the Sacker and Sell spectrum of its linear part. The model gives rise to a pattern of nonautonomous Hopf bifurcation which can be understood as a generalization of the classical autonomous one. We pay special attention to the dynamics at the bifurcation point, showing the possibility of occurrence of Li-Yorke chaos in the corresponding attractor and hence of a high degree of unpredictability.