Tellus: Series A, Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography (Jan 2020)

Observational evidence that a feedback control system with proportional-integral-derivative characteristics is operating on atmospheric surface temperature at global scale

  • L. Mark W. Leggett,
  • David A. Ball

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/16000870.2020.1717268
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 72, no. 1
pp. 1 – 14

Abstract

Read online

Here we provide statistically significant observational evidence that a feedback control system moderating atmospheric temperature is presently operating coherently at global scale. Further, this control system is of a sophisticated type, involving the corrective feedback not only of a linear error term but also its derivative and its integral. This makes it of the same type as the most widely used control system developed by humans, the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control system.

Keywords