Assessing the direction of climate interactions by means of complex networks and information theoretic tools

View/Open
Document typeArticle
Defense date2015-03-01
PublisherInstitute of Physics (IOP)
Rights accessOpen Access
All rights reserved. This work is protected by the corresponding intellectual and industrial
property rights. Without prejudice to any existing legal exemptions, reproduction, distribution, public
communication or transformation of this work are prohibited without permission of the copyright holder
Abstract
An estimate of the net direction of climate interactions in different geographical regions is made by constructing a directed climate network from a regular latitude-longitude grid of nodes, using a directionality index (DI) based on conditional mutual information (CMI). Two datasets of surface air temperature anomalies-one monthly averaged and another daily averaged-are analyzed and compared. The network links are interpreted in terms of known atmospheric tropical and extratropical variability patterns. Specific and relevant geographical regions are selected, the net direction of propagation of the atmospheric patterns is analyzed, and the direction of the inferred links is validated by recovering some well-known climate variability structures. These patterns are found to be acting at various time-scales, such as atmospheric waves in the extratropics or longer range events in the tropics. This analysis demonstrates the capability of the DI measure to infer the net direction of climate interactions and may contribute to improve the present understanding of climate phenomena and climate predictability. The work presented here also stands out as an application of advanced tools to the analysis of empirical, real-world data. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.
Description
Copyright 2015 AIP Publishing. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing
CitationDeza, J.Ignacio, Barreiro, M., Masoller, C. Assessing the direction of climate interactions by means of complex networks and information theoretic tools. "Chaos", 01 Març 2015, vol. 25, núm. 3, p. 1-11.
ISSN1054-1500
Files | Description | Size | Format | View |
---|---|---|---|---|
1.4914101.pdf | 6,861Mb | View/Open |