Representation of European hydroclimatic patterns with self-organizing maps

Abstract

Self-organizing maps provide a powerful, non-linear technique of dimensionality reduction that can be used to identify clusters with similar attributes. Here, they were constructed from a 1000-year-long gridded palaeoclimatic dataset, namely the Old World Drought Atlas, to detect regions of homogeneous hydroclimatic variability across the European continent. A classification scheme of 10 regions was found to describe most efficiently the spatial properties of Europe’s hydroclimate. These regions were mainly divided into a northern and a southern subset, linked together with a northwest-to-southeast orientation. Further analysis of the classification scheme with complex networks confirmed the divergence between the northern and southern components of European hydroclimate, also revealing that is not strongly correlated to the Iberian Peninsula. On the contrary, the region covering the British Isles, France and Germany appeared to be linked to both branches, implying links of hydroclimate with atmospheric/oceanic circulation.