Climate index
Climate Change 2021 – The Physical Science Basis, Annex VII: Glossary, written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, defines the climate index as: ‘A time series constructed from climate variables that provides an aggregate summary of the state of the climate system. For example, the difference between sea level pressure in Iceland and the Azores provides a simple yet useful historical North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index. Because of their optimal properties, climate indices are often defined using principal components – linear combinations of climate variables at different locations that have maximum variance subject to certain normalization constraints (e.g., the Northern Annular Mode (NAM) and Southern Annular Mode (SAM) indices, which are principal components of Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere gridded pressure anomalies, respectively).’
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