A Review of the Detection Methods for Climate Regime Shifts

Qunqun Liu,Shiquan Wan,Bin Gu

doi:10.1155/2016/3536183

Abstract

An abrupt climate change means that the climate system shifts from a steady state to another steady state. Study on the phenomenon and theory of the abrupt climate change is a new research field of modern climatology, and it is of great significance for the prediction of future climate change. The climate regime shift is one of the most common forms of abrupt climate change, which mainly refers to the statistical significant changes on the variable of climate system at one time scale. These detection methods can be roughly divided into five categories based on different types of abrupt changes, namely, abrupt mean value change, abrupt variance change, abrupt frequency change, abrupt probability density change, and the multivariable analysis. The main research progress of abrupt climate change detection methods is reviewed. What is more, some actual applications of those methods in observational data are provided. With the development of nonlinear science, many new methods have been presented for detecting an abrupt dynamic change in recent years, which is useful supplement for the abrupt change detection methods.

Highlights

The research on the phenomenon of abrupt climate change and the related theory is an important field in modern climatology, which is one of the core issues concerning the global climate change
A large amount of numerical experiments showed that sliding transformation parameter (STP) could identify the abrupt probability density change in the artificial series, and it performed much better than the kurtosis coefficient and the skewness coefficient
We briefly review some advances in the abrupt climate change detection methods in recent years

Summary

Introduction

The research on the phenomenon of abrupt climate change and the related theory is an important field in modern climatology, which is one of the core issues concerning the global climate change. Transition in the climate state, which mainly refers to the notion that there is a statistically significant change in the statistical features of the system state variable over a certain time scale, is one of the most common types of abrupt change phenomenon. This type of abrupt climate change can be roughly divided into five categories: abrupt mean value change, abrupt variance change, abrupt frequency change, abrupt probability density change, and multivariate analysis.

Abrupt Mean Value Change Detection Methods

Detection Methods for the Abrupt Probability Density Change

Other Types of Abrupt Detection Methods

Findings

Discussion and Conclusions