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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Tropical and mid-latitude teleconnections interacting with the Indian summer monsoon rainfall: a theory-guided causal effect network approach
    (Göttingen : Copernicus Publ., 2020) Di Capua, Giorgia; Kretschmer, Marlene; Donner, Reik V.; van den Hurk, Bart; Vellore, Ramesh; Krishnan, Raghavan; Coumou, Dim
    The alternation of active and break phases in Indian summer monsoon (ISM) rainfall at intraseasonal timescales characterizes each ISM season. Both tropical and mid-latitude drivers influence this intraseasonal ISM variability. The circumglobal teleconnection observed in boreal summer drives intraseasonal variability across the mid-latitudes, and a two-way interaction between the ISM and the circumglobal teleconnection pattern has been hypothesized. We use causal discovery algorithms to test the ISM circumglobal teleconnection hypothesis in a causal framework. A robust causal link from the circumglobal teleconnection pattern and the North Atlantic region to ISM rainfall is identified, and we estimate the normalized causal effect (CE) of this link to be about 0.2 (a 1 standard deviation shift in the circumglobal teleconnection causes a 0.2 standard deviation shift in the ISM rainfall 1 week later). The ISM rainfall feeds back on the circumglobal teleconnection pattern, however weakly. Moreover, we identify a negative feedback between strong updraft located over India and the Bay of Bengal and the ISM rainfall acting at a biweekly timescale, with enhanced ISM rainfall following strong updraft by 1 week. This mechanism is possibly related to the boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation. The updraft has the strongest CE of 0.5, while the Madden–Julian oscillation variability has a CE of 0.2–0.3. Our results show that most of the ISM variability on weekly timescales comes from these tropical drivers, though the mid-latitude teleconnection also exerts a substantial influence. Identifying these local and remote drivers paves the way for improved subseasonal forecasts.
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    Disentangling nonlinear geomagnetic variability during magnetic storms and quiescence by timescale dependent recurrence properties
    (Les Ulis : EDP Sciences, 2020) Alberti, Tommaso; Lekscha, Jaqueline; Consolini, Giuseppe; De Michelis, Paola; Donner, Reik V.
    Understanding the complex behavior of the near-Earth electromagnetic environment is one of the main challenges of Space Weather studies. This includes both the correct characterization of the different physical mechanisms responsible for its configuration and dynamics as well as the efforts which are needed for a correct forecasting of several phenomena. By using a nonlinear multi-scale dynamical systems approach, we provide here new insights into the scale-to-scale dynamical behavior of both quiet and disturbed periods of geomagnetic activity. The results show that a scale-dependent dynamical transition occurs when moving from short to long timescales, i.e., from fast to slow dynamical processes, the latter being characterized by a more regular behavior, while more dynamical anomalies are found in the behavior of the fast component. This suggests that different physical processes are typical for both dynamical regimes: the fast component, being characterized by a more chaotic and less predictable behavior, can be related to the internal dynamical state of the near-Earth electromagnetic environment, while the slow component seems to be less chaotic and associated with the directly driven processes related to the interplanetary medium variability. Moreover, a clear difference has been found between quiet and disturbed periods, the former being more complex than the latter. These findings support the view that, for a correct forecasting in the framework of Space Weather studies, more attention needs to be devoted to the identification of proxies describing the internal dynamical state of the near-Earth electromagnetic environment. © T. Alberti et al., Published by EDP Sciences 2020.
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    Meridionally Extending Anomalous Wave Train over Asia During Breaks in the Indian Summer Monsoon
    ([Cham] : Springer International Publishing, 2019) Umakanth, Uppara; Vellore, Ramesh K.; Krishnan, R.; Choudhury, Ayantika Dey; Bisht, Jagat S.H.; Di Capua, Giorgia; Coumou, Dim; Donner, Reik V.
    Anomalous interactions between the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) circulation and subtropical westerlies are known to trigger breaks in the ISM on subseasonal time-scales, characterised by a pattern of suppressed rainfall over central-north India, and enhanced rainfall over the foothills of the central–eastern Himalayas (CEH). An intriguing feature during ISM breaks is the formation of a mid-tropospheric cyclonic circulation anomaly extending over the subtropical and mid-latitude areas of the Asian continent. This study investigates the mechanism of the aforesaid Asian continental mid-tropospheric cyclonic circulation (ACMCC) anomaly using observations and simplified model experiments. The results of our study indicate that the ACMCC during ISM breaks is part of a larger meridional wave train comprising of alternating anticyclonic and cyclonic anomalies that extend poleward from the monsoon region to the Arctic. A lead–lag analysis of mid-tropospheric circulation anomalies suggests that the meridional wave-train generation is linked to latent heating (LH) anomalies over the CEH foothills, Indo-China, and the Indian landmass during ISM breaks. By conducting sensitivity experiments using a simplified global atmospheric general circulation model forced with satellite-derived three-dimensional LH, it is demonstrated that the combined effects of the enhanced LH over the CEH foothills and Indo-China and decreased LH over the Indian landmass during ISM breaks are pivotal for generating the poleward extending meridional wave train and the ACMCC anomaly. At the same time, the spatial extent of the mid-latitude cyclonic anomaly over Far-East Asia is also influenced by the anomalous LH over central–eastern China. While the present findings provide interesting insights into the role of LH anomalies during ISM breaks on the poleward extending meridional wave train, the ACMCC anomaly is found to have important ramifications on the daily rainfall extremes over the Indo-China region. It is revealed from the present analysis that the frequency of extreme rainfall occurrences over Indo-China shows a twofold increase during ISM break periods as compared to active ISM conditions. © 2019, The Author(s).
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    A climate network perspective on the intertropical convergence zone
    (Göttingen : Copernicus Publ., 2021) Wolf, Frederik; Voigt, Aiko; Donner, Reik V.
    The intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) is an important component of the tropical rain belt. Climate models continue to struggle to adequately represent the ITCZ and differ substantially in its simulated response to climate change. Here we employ complex network approaches, which extract spatiotemporal variability patterns from climate data, to better understand differences in the dynamics of the ITCZ in state-of-the-art global circulation models (GCMs). For this purpose, we study simulations with 14 GCMs in an idealized slab-ocean aquaplanet setup from TRACMIP – the Tropical Rain belts with an Annual cycle and a Continent Model Intercomparison Project. We construct network representations based on the spatial correlation patterns of monthly surface temperature anomalies and study the zonal-mean patterns of different topological and spatial network characteristics. Specifically, we cluster the GCMs by means of the distributions of their zonal network measures utilizing hierarchical clustering. We find that in the control simulation, the distributions of the zonal network measures are able to pick up model differences in the tropical sea surface temperature (SST) contrast, the ITCZ position, and the strength of the Southern Hemisphere Hadley cell. Although we do not find evidence for consistent modifications in the network structure tracing the response of the ITCZ to global warming in the considered model ensemble, our analysis demonstrates that coherent variations of the global SST field are linked to ITCZ dynamics. This suggests that climate networks can provide a new perspective on ITCZ dynamics and model differences therein.
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    Multiscale fractal dimension analysis of a reduced order model of coupled ocean–atmosphere dynamics
    (Göttingen : Copernicus Publ., 2021) Alberti, Tommaso; Donner, Reik V.; Vannitsem, Stéphane
    Atmosphere and ocean dynamics display many complex features and are characterized by a wide variety of processes and couplings across different timescales. Here we demonstrate the application of multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) to investigate the multivariate and multiscale properties of a reduced order model of the ocean–atmosphere coupled dynamics. MEMD provides a decomposition of the original multivariate time series into a series of oscillating patterns with time-dependent amplitude and phase by exploiting the local features of the data and without any a priori assumptions on the decomposition basis. Moreover, each oscillating pattern, usually named multivariate intrinsic mode function (MIMF), represents a local source of information that can be used to explore the behavior of fractal features at different scales by defining a sort of multiscale and multivariate generalized fractal dimensions. With these two complementary approaches, we show that the ocean–atmosphere dynamics presents a rich variety of features, with different multifractal properties for the ocean and the atmosphere at different timescales. For weak ocean–atmosphere coupling, the resulting dimensions of the two model components are very different, while for strong coupling for which coupled modes develop, the scaling properties are more similar especially at longer timescales. The latter result reflects the presence of a coherent coupled dynamics. Finally, we also compare our model results with those obtained from reanalysis data demonstrating that the latter exhibit a similar qualitative behavior in terms of multiscale dimensions and the existence of a scale dependency of the statistics of the phase-space density of points for different regions, which is related to the different drivers and processes occurring at different timescales in the coupled atmosphere–ocean system. Our approach can therefore be used to diagnose the strength of coupling in real applications.
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    Detecting dynamical anomalies in time series from different palaeoclimate proxy archives using windowed recurrence network analysis
    (Katlenburg-Lindau : European Geophysical Society, 2020) Lekscha, Jaqueline; Donner, Reik V.
    Analysing palaeoclimate proxy time series using windowed recurrence network analysis (wRNA) has been shown to provide valuable information on past climate variability. In turn, it has also been found that the robustness of the obtained results differs among proxies from different palaeoclimate archives. To systematically test the suitability of wRNA for studying different types of palaeoclimate proxy time series, we use the framework of forward proxy modelling. For this, we create artificial input time series with different properties and compare the areawise significant anomalies detected using wRNA of the input and the model output time series. Also, taking into account results for general filtering of different time series, we find that the variability of the network transitivity is altered for stochastic input time series while being rather robust for deterministic input. In terms of significant anomalies of the network transitivity, we observe that these anomalies may be missed by proxies from tree and lake archives after the non-linear filtering by the corresponding proxy system models. For proxies from speleothems, we additionally observe falsely identified significant anomalies that are not present in the input time series. Finally, for proxies from ice cores, the wRNA results show the best correspondence to those for the input data. Our results contribute to improve the interpretation of windowed recurrence network analysis results obtained from real-world palaeoclimate time series.