Network analysis reveals strongly localized impacts of El Niño

Jingfang Fan, Jun Meng, Yosef Ashkenazy, Shlomo Havlin, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

92 Scopus citations

Abstract

Climatic conditions influence the culture and economy of societies and the performance of economies. Specifically, El Niño as an extreme climate event is known to have notable effects on health, agriculture, industry, and conflict. Here, we construct directed and weighted climate networks based on near-surface air temperature to investigate the global impacts of El Niño and La Niña. We find that regions that are characterized by higher positive/negative network “in”-weighted links are exhibiting stronger correlations with the El Niño basin and are warmer/cooler during El Niño/La Niña periods. In contrast to non-El Niño periods, these stronger in-weighted activities are found to be concentrated in very localized areas, whereas a large fraction of the globe is not influenced by the events. The regions of localized activity vary from one El Niño (La Niña) event to another; still, some El Niño (La Niña) events are more similar to each other. We quantify this similarity using network community structure. The results and methodology reported here may be used to improve the understanding and prediction of El Niño/La Niña events and also may be applied in the investigation of other climate variables.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)7543-7548
Number of pages6
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume114
Issue number29
DOIs
StatePublished - 18 Jul 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Funding

We thank Avi Gozolchiani for helpful discussions. This work was supported by MULTIPLEX EU (European Union) Project 317532; the Israel Science Foundation; the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) with the Italy Ministry of Foreign Affairs; MOST with the Japan Science and Technology Agency; the Office of Naval Research; and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. J.F. was supported by a fellowship program funded by the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education of Israel.

FundersFunder number
MULTIPLEX EU
Office of Naval Research
Defense Threat Reduction Agency
European Commission317532
Japan Science and Technology Agency
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Israel Science Foundation
Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Council for Higher Education
Ministry of science and technology, Israel

    Keywords

    • Climate
    • Dynamic network
    • ENSO

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