Review article: Dynamical systems, algebraic topology and the climate sciences

Abstract

Abstract. The definition of climate itself cannot be given without a proper understanding of the key ideas of long-term behavior of a system, as provided by dynamical systems theory. Hence, it is not surprising that concepts and methods of this theory have percolated into the climate sciences as early as the 1960s. The major increase in public awareness of the socio-economic threats and opportunities of climate change has led more recently to two major developments in the climate sciences: (i) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's successive Assessment Reports and (ii) an increasing understanding of the interplay between natural climate variability and anthropogenically driven climate change. Both of these developments have benefited from remarkable technological advances in computing resources, relating throughput as well as storage, and in observational capabilities, regarding both platforms and instruments. Starting with the early contributions of nonlinear dynamics to the climate sciences, we review here the more recent contributions of (a) the theory of non-autonomous and random dynamical systems to an understanding of the interplay between natural variability and anthropogenic climate change and (b) the role of algebraic topology in shedding additional light on this interplay. The review is thus a trip leading from the applications of classical bifurcation theory to multiple possible climates to the tipping points associated with transitions from one type of climatic behavior to another in the presence of time-dependent forcing, deterministic as well as stochastic.