Improved El Niño-Forecasting by Cooperativity Detection

Abstract

Although anomalous episodical warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific, dubbed El Niño by Peruvian fishermen, has major (and occasionally devastating) impacts around the globe, robust forecasting is still limited to about six months ahead. A significant extension of the pre-warming time would be instrumental for avoiding some of the worst damages such as harvest failures in developing countries. Here we introduce a novel avenue towards El Niño-prediction based on network methods inspecting emerging teleconnections. Our approach starts from the evidence that a large-scale cooperative mode - linking the El Niño-basin (equatorial Pacific corridor) and the rest of the ocean - builds up in the calendar year before the warming event. On this basis, we can develop an efficient 12 months-forecasting scheme, i.e., achieve some doubling of the early-warning period. Our method is based on high-quality observational data as available since 1950 and yields hit rates above 0.5, while false-alarm rates are below 0.1.

7 pages, 3 figures

Cited by in corpus (30)

• Social physics
• Statistical physics approaches to the complex Earth system
• Unified functional network and nonlinear time series analysis for complex systems science: The pyunicorn package
• Disentangling different types of El Niño episodes by evolving climate network analysis
• The dominant imprint of Rossby waves in the climate network
• Robustness of partially interdependent network formed of clustered networks
• The influence of the broadness of the degree distribution on network's robustness: comparing localized attack and random attack
• $k$-core percolation on complex networks: Comparing random, localized and targeted attacks
• Complexity based approach for El Nino magnitude forecasting before the "spring predictability barrier"
• Percolation framework to describe El Niño conditions
• Climate network percolation reveals the expansion and weakening of the tropical component under global warming
• How complex climate networks complement eigen techniques for the statistical analysis of climatological data
• A climate network-based index to discriminate different types of El Niño and La Niña
• Testing reanalysis datasets in Antarctica: Trends, persistence properties and trend significance
• Forecasting the magnitude and onset of El Nino based on climate network
• Stability threshold approach for complex dynamical systems
• Optimal model-free prediction from multivariate time series
• Percolation-based precursors of transitions in extended systems
• Hierarchical structures in Northern Hemispheric extratropical winter ocean-atmosphere interactions
• A Climate Network Based Stability Index for El Niño Variability
• Oceanic El-Niño wave dynamics and climate networks
• Could quantum gravity slow down neutrinos?
• Eigen Microstates and Their Evolution of Global Ozone at Different Geopotential Heights
• Complex systems: features, similarity and connectivity
• A perturbative approach to Lagrangian flow networks
• Study of the atmospheric conditions at Cerro Armazones using astronomical data
• Evaluation of the Real-time El Niño Forecasts by the Climate Network Approach between 2011 and Present
• Long-term prediction of El Niño-Southern Oscillation using reservoir computing with data-driven realtime filter
• Very early warning signal for El Niño in 2020 with a 4 in 5 likelihood
• Climate network and complexity based El Niño forecast for 2022