Abstract
The energy balance of the Earth is controlled by the shortwave and longwave radiation emitted to space. Changes in the thermodynamic state of the system over time affect climate and are noticeable when viewing the system as a whole. In this paper, we study the changes in the complexity of climate in the last four decades using data from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). First, we study the complexity of the shortwave and longwave radiation fields independently using Approximate Entropy and Sample Entropy, observing that the rate of complexity change is faster for shortwave radiation. Then, we study the causality of those changes using Transfer Entropy to capture the non-linear dynamics of climate, showing that the changes are mainly driven by the variations in shortwave radiation. The observed behavior of climatic complexity could be explained by the changes in cloud amount, and we research that possibility by investigating its evolution from a complexity perspective using data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP).
Highlights
The energy balance of the Earth is controlled by the shortwave and longwave radiation emitted to space
We keep our work within the Information Theory domain and present an analysis of causality based on Transfer Entropy[33], another measure which allows us to determine the causality between two series of data without being restricted to an underlying linear dynamics
We analyze the complexity of the shortwave and www.nature.com/scientificreports longwave radiation data individually with ApEn and SampEn to study the changes in their complexity through time
Summary
The energy balance of the Earth is controlled by the shortwave and longwave radiation emitted to space. We keep our work within the Information Theory domain and present an analysis of causality based on Transfer Entropy[33], another measure which allows us to determine the causality between two series of data without being restricted to an underlying linear dynamics.
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