Understanding marine climate variability is important for coastal planning and marine operations. It is also particularly challenging for complicated settings (e.g., islands) and data-poor regions. The aim of this work is to establish a relationship between daily synoptic atmospheric patterns, and wave and storm surge conditions around New Zealand waters, based on instrumental and reanalysis data. The daily predictor we developed is able to represent sea and swell wave conditions as well as storm surge variability over different temporal scales. However, when climate variability is analysed on a longer temporal period, based on the 20th century reanalysis, large inhomogeneities are found. This highlights the dangers related to assessing climate variability, especially in data-poor regions (such as New Zealand), where inhomogeneities could be interpreted as actual changes.

Autoregressive logistic regression models have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for statistical simulation of spatial patterns in climate and meteorology fields. In this paper we introduce a statistical framework for the simulation of ocean current patterns based on the autoregressive logistic regression models, and apply it to the Gulf of Mexico Loop Current. The statistical model is forced by three autoregressive terms, the wind stress curl in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean Sea, and the sea level pressure anomalies over the North Atlantic. It is used to replicate the bi-weekly historical sequence of 8 Loop Current patterns, obtained from a 24-year altimetry derived dataset. The model reproduces the inter-annual and intra-annual variability of the original time series, showing notable fitting capacity. A point-by-point comparison between the actual and simulated pattern series confirms the capability of the model in analysing the evolution of ocean current patterns. The predictive skill of the model is also explored, and the preliminary forecast (up to 3 months) results are encouraging. The presented statistical framework may find more practical applications in the future, such as the generation of statistically sound climate-based oceanographic scenarios for risk analyses, and the mid-term probabilistic prediction of ocean current patterns.