Concepedia

What Do Networks Have to Do with Climate?

Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle L. Swanson, Paul J. Roebber

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · 2006 · 348 citations · 38 references

TL;DR

Network science has become a major research tool, with discoveries of small‑world and scale‑free structures revealing new insights into collective behavior in complex systems. The paper introduces network concepts and their initial applications to the climate system. The authors apply network theory to climate by modeling teleconnections and other climate variables as nodes and links. The climate system shows small‑world and scale‑free properties with supernodes linked to major teleconnections, implying that teleconnection organization may influence climate stability and that temporal network changes could signal global change, positioning networks as a new tool for climate dynamics analysis.

Abstract

The study of networks has recently exploded into a major research tool in many areas of science. The discovery of “small world” and scale-free networks has led to many new insights about the collective behavior of a large number of interacting agents and complex systems. Here we introduce the basic ideas behind networks, as well as some initial applications of networks to the climate system. Our results suggest that the climate system exhibits aspects of small-world networks as well as scale-free networks, with supernodes corresponding to major teleconnection patterns. This result suggests that the organization of teleconnections may play a role in the stability of the climate system. In addition, preliminary work suggests that temporal changes in the network's architecture may be used to identify signatures of global change. These and other applications suggest that networks provide a new tool for investigating and reconstructing climate dynamics from both models and observations.