Atmospheric and oceanic excitation of the Earth's wobbles during 1980-2000

Because of the action of various geophysical excitation mechanisms, the Earth does not rotate about its figure axis, so it wobbles as it rotates. Here, the effectiveness of atmospheric and oceanic processes in exciting the Earth's wobbles during 1980-2000 is evaluated using estimates of atmospheric angular momentum from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis project and estimates of oceanic angular momentum from the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) consortium's simulation of the general circulation of the oceans. On intraseasonal timescales, atmospheric surface pressure changes are found to be the single most effective process exciting the Earth's wobbles, explaining about twice as much of the observed variance as do either atmospheric wind or ocean bottom pressure changes and nearly 4 times as much of the observed variance as do oceanic currents. However, on interannual timescales, ocean bottom pressure changes are found to be the single most effective process exciting the Earth's wobbles, explaining more than 5 times as much of the observed variance as do atmospheric wind and pressure changes combined, and more than twice as much of the observed variance as do oceanic currents. Within the Chandler band it is found that during 1980-2000 atmospheric and oceanic processes have enough power to excite the Chandler wobble and are significantly coherent with it. The single most important mechanism exciting the Chandler wobble is found to be ocean bottom pressure variations. Atmospheric and oceanic processes do not appear to have enough power to excite the Earth's wobbles to their observed levels on pentadal and longer timescales, although series longer than the 21-year long series used here need to be studied in order to obtain greater statistical significance of this result.