Abstract
In this study, sea surface air temperature over the Pacific is constructed as a network, and the influences of sea surface temperature anomaly in the tropical central eastern Pacific (El Niño/La Niña) are regarded as a kind of natural attack on the network. The results show that El Niño/La Niña leads an abrupt percolation phase transition on the climate networks from stable to unstable or metastable phase state, corresponding to the fact that the climate condition changes from normal to abnormal significantly during El Niño/La Niña. By simulating three different forms of attacks on an idealized network, including Most connected Attack (MA), Localized Attack (LA) and Random Attack (RA), we found that both MA and LA lead to stepwise phase transitions, while RA leads to a second-order phase transition. It is found that most attacks due to El Niño/La Niña are close to the combination of MA and LA, and a percolation critical threshold Pc can be estimated to determine whether the percolation phase transition happens. Therefore, the findings in this study may renew our understandings of the influence of El Niño/La Niña on climate, and further help us in better predicting the subsequent events triggered by El Niño/La Niña.
Highlights
El Niño/La Niña, characterized by anomalous warming/cooling in the tropical central eastern Pacific, is one of the most important ocean-atmosphere coupled phenomena in climate system
Because the atmosphere above ocean can be heated/cooled by the sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA), which means the links in the surface air temperature network can be influenced[26,27]
We consider the surface air temperature field over Pacific as a network, and the influence of El Niño/La Niña as attacks on the network. By measuring quantities such as the total degrees of connection DT and the intensity of attack P, we find the surface air temperature network will be influenced in terms of isolating nodes under the attacks of El Niño/ La Niña
Summary
El Niño/La Niña, characterized by anomalous warming/cooling in the tropical central eastern Pacific, is one of the most important ocean-atmosphere coupled phenomena in climate system. More and more studies have applied the concept of complex networks to investigate climate system It is called climate network, where different regions of the world are represented as nodes which communicate with each other by exchanging heat, material, and even forces. The critical probability Pc, called as the percolation threshold, can be defined as the fraction of node removal, which in other words, means the percentage of node that the links have been cutoff from the entire network This kind of node removal can be considered as an attack on network, and the phenomenon is markedly similar to a percolation phase transition. A detailed discussion is made in the “Conclusion and Discussion” section, and a brief description of the data and methods are provided in the end of this paper
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