Understanding the variability of the Earth's climate is complicated by the mutual interactions that exist between the atmosphere and the oceans of the Earth. The purpose of the research described in this paper is to attempt to understand the rudiments of such interactions by constructing a simple 1-D atmosphere-ocean model in order to examine the sensitivity of the equilibrium of a coupled climate "system" to changes in the imposed external forcings....

A time-dependent, hemispheric, primitive-equation numerical model is constructed to test Hines' (1974) hypothesis that solar variations induce changes in the distributions of basic state variables at high levels in the atmosphere, and thus induce changes in planetary-scale wave structure at lower atmospheric levels. This mechanism was proposed to explain apparent atmospheric responses to solar activity.

The phenomenon of vacillation in a rotating annulus is studied as a possible analogue for the atmospheric index cycle.