Abstract. We propose a new concept of abrupt climate change transition and create a novel detection method to identify the transition process. With this method, how the climate system transits from one stable state to another could be verified clearly. By applying this method to the global sea surface temperature data over the past century, several climate change processes are detected, including their starting state (moment), persist time, and ending state (moment) etc. According to the spatial distributions, the locations of climate changes mainly occurred in Indian ocean and western Pacific before the middle twentieth century, while the climate changes in 1970s located in equatorial middle-eastern Pacific, and the climate changes happened in the middle and southern Pacific since the end twentieth century. In addition, an quantitative relationship among the transition process parameters has been exposed in theory and practice, which the relationship between the rate and stability parameters is linear, and the relationship between the rate and change amplitude parameters is quadratic.
Abrupt climate change as an important agent of ecological change in the Northeast U.S. throughout the past 15,000 years