On the Role of Atmospheric Teleconnections in Climate

Abstract In a recent application of networks to 500-hPa data, it was found that supernodes in the network correspond to major teleconnection. More specifically, in the Northern Hemisphere a set of supernodes coincides with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and another set is located in the area where the Pacific–North American (PNA) and the tropical Northern Hemisphere (TNH) patterns are found. It was subsequently suggested that the presence of atmospheric teleconnections make climate more stable and more efficient in transferring information. Here this hypothesis is tested by examining the topology of the complete network as well as of the networks without teleconnections. It is found that indeed without teleconnections the network becomes less stable and less efficient in transferring information. It was also found that the pattern chiefly responsible for this mechanism in the extratropics is the NAO. The other patterns are simply a linear response of the activity in the tropics and their role in thi...

[1]  J. Wallace,et al.  Teleconnections in the Geopotential Height Field during the Northern Hemisphere Winter , 1981 .

[2]  Louis M. Pecora,et al.  Fundamentals of synchronization in chaotic systems, concepts, and applications. , 1997, Chaos.

[3]  R. Wayne Higgins,et al.  The Pacific–South American Modes and Tropical Convection during the Southern Hemisphere Winter , 1998 .

[4]  J. Wallace,et al.  The Arctic oscillation signature in the wintertime geopotential height and temperature fields , 1998 .

[5]  Jianping Huang,et al.  The relationship between the North Atlantic Oscillation and El Niño‐Southern Oscillation , 1998 .

[6]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks , 1998, Nature.

[7]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Internet: Diameter of the World-Wide Web , 1999, Nature.

[8]  Suranjana Saha,et al.  Empirical Orthogonal Teleconnections , 2000 .

[9]  M. Mézard,et al.  Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy , 2000, cond-mat/0002374.

[10]  D. Pozo-Vázquez,et al.  The Association between ENSO and Winter Atmospheric Circulation and Temperature in the North Atlantic Region , 2001 .

[11]  W. Collins,et al.  The NCEP–NCAR 50-Year Reanalysis: Monthly Means CD-ROM and Documentation , 2001 .

[12]  L. Amaral,et al.  The web of human sexual contacts , 2001, Nature.

[13]  A. Barabasi,et al.  Lethality and centrality in protein networks , 2001, Nature.

[14]  Alessandro Vespignani,et al.  Epidemic spreading in scale-free networks. , 2000, Physical review letters.

[15]  S. Strogatz.  Exploring complex networks , 2001, Nature.

[16]  J. Shukla,et al.  Does ENSO Force the PNA , 2002 .

[17]  Paul J. Roebber,et al.  The architecture of the climate network , 2004 .

[18]  S. Havlin,et al.  Self-similarity of complex networks , 2005, Nature.

[19]  Paul J. Roebber,et al.  What Do Networks Have to Do with Climate , 2006 .

[20]  Agata Fronczak,et al.  Thermodynamic forces, flows, and Onsager coefficients in complex networks. , 2007, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[21]  Sergey Kravtsov,et al.  A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts , 2007 .

[22]  Anastasios A. Tsonis,et al.  Estimating the clustering coefficient in scale-free networks on lattices with local spatial correlation structure , 2008 .

[23]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Scale-free networks , 2008, Scholarpedia.