Early warning signal for interior crises in excitable systems

Abstract

The ability to reliably predict critical transitions in dynamical systems is a long-standing goal of diverse scientific communities. Previous work focused on early warning signals related to local bifurcations (critical slowing down) and non-bifurcation type transitions. We extend this toolbox and report on a characteristic scaling behavior (critical attractor growth) which is indicative of an impending global bifurcation, an interior crisis in excitable systems. We demonstrate our early warning signal in a conceptual climate model as well as in a model of coupled neurons known to exhibit extreme events. We observed critical attractor growth prior to interior crises of chaotic as well as strange-nonchaotic attractors. These observations promise to extend the classes of transitions that can be predicted via early warning signals.

arXiv comment6 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Extreme events in dynamical systems and random walkers: A review
• Routes to extreme events in dynamical systems: Dynamical and Statistical Characteristics
• Identifying edges that facilitate the generation of extreme events in networked dynamical systems
• Evidence for crisis-induced intermittency during geomagnetic superchron transitions