Cross-scale organization of the atmospheric circulation: a falsification-grade research program (Shroedinger, gen3)

Code, frozen protocols and numerical results of a preregistered research program on the cross-scale organization of the atmospheric circulation, computed from the ERA5 and MERRA-2 reanalyses.

Objects. Two descriptors of the 850 hPa relative vorticity field are introduced and tested: the cross-scale envelope-coupling profile P (spatial rank correlation of the activity maps of adjacent octave levels) and the transfer-asymmetry index A (norm of the commutator of the estimated aggregation and detailing operators, i.e. a measure of how irreversible the transition between levels of description is).

Main results. Both descriptors form stable regional signatures across seasons, years and ENSO phases (p = 0.001 on held-out samples). The index A carries information beyond the power spectrum, beyond the profile P and beyond semi-fractal level characteristics, is robust to controls for domain geometry and for the effective resolution of the reanalysis, and its regional geography replicates in an independent reanalysis (ERA5 vs MERRA-2, Spearman rho = 0.93, p < 1e-4). Maxima occur over moist-convective oceanic regimes, minima over arid continental ones.

Contents. Eight frozen preregistered protocols with deviation logs; an independent methodological audit and the remediation computations it prompted; a complete catalogue of the program's negative results (no relation to the cross-scale energy flux, no universal covariate law, no instantaneous local source, no vertical universality, no information on the reanalysis moisture-budget residual); per-region-window numerical results and figures; downloaders and a resumable pipeline; a table of all 73 experiments across three generations of the program.

Note on earlier versions. This release supersedes the earlier snapshots of this repository. The empirical claim advertised by those snapshots (a local Lambda_b ~ Pi_b closure) was tested under the present program and not confirmed; see docs/RECONCILIATION.md for the authoritative scoreboard and docs/RESEARCH_PROGRAM_FULL.csv for the per-experiment status.