The improvement of the Morlet wavelet for multi-period analysis of climate data

The multi-level dynamics of an atmosphere system exhibits temporal structures in different types of climate data. This article addresses two issues in multi-period analysis of climate data. Firstly, the advantages of the modified Morlet wavelet transform (MMWT) for analyzing multi-period structure of time series over Morlet wavelet transform (MWT) are emphasized. Secondly, the multi-period issues of temperature data are studied with MMWT through four steps: the four dominant periods of 60 year temperature data are determined with the wavelet variance; by analyzing the real part of MMWT, the warm and cold stages of the temperature data at different scales are determined, and the time intervals of the warm and cold interchange are singled out; the amplitude of each periodic component is quantitatively characterized by the amplitude of wavelet coefficients; the most intensive oscillation time intervals are computed by the squared modulus of the MMWT (MMPS).