A Complex Network approach for studying Tropical Cyclones

Author(s):  
Shraddha Gupta ◽  
Niklas Boers ◽  
Florian Pappenberger ◽  
Jürgen Kurths

<p>Complex network theory provides a powerful framework to study the collective dynamics of the interacting units that constitute a complex system. Functional climate network analysis has been widely applied to study the evolution of climate phenomena such as the South American Monsoon and El Niño which occur over seasonal to (inter-)annual time scales. In this work, we use an evolving climate network approach for the study of tropical cyclones (TCs), which are highly localized extreme weather phenomena occurring over very short time scales (typically 3-10 days). We construct time-evolving climate networks of overlapping short-length (10-14 days) time windows using ERA5 reanalysis mean sea level pressure. We focus on studying the dynamics of the cyclones in the North Indian Ocean and the tropical Atlantic Ocean TC basins. We compute topological measures such as degree centrality as well as the local and global clustering coefficients for successive networks during the cyclone season. We find that, during a TC, the network undergoes a characteristic spatial reorganization in a way that localized structures with high clustering and low degree emerge along the TC track. We also compare the spatial scales involved in the regional weather system in the absence and presence of a TC, within the time span of the network. Our results show that weather variability at daily time scales, and in particular tropical cyclones, can be captured effectively by evolving climate networks.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shraddha Gupta ◽  
Niklas Boers ◽  
Florian Pappenberger ◽  
Jürgen Kurths

Abstract Tropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the most destructive natural hazards that pose a serious threat to society around the globe, particularly to those in the coastal regions. In this work, we study the temporal evolution of the regional weather conditions in relation to the occurrence of TCs using climate networks. Climate networks encode the interactions among climate variables at different locations on the Earth's surface, and in particular, time-evolving climate networks have been successfully applied to study different climate phenomena at comparably long time scales, such as the El Ni~no Southern Oscillation, different monsoon systems, or the climatic impacts of volcanic eruptions. Here, we develop and apply a complex network approach suitable for the investigation of the relatively short-lived TCs. We show that our proposed methodology has the potential to identify TCs and their tracks from mean sea level pressure (MSLP) data. We use the ERA5 reanalysis MSLP data to construct successive networks 20 of overlapping, short-length time windows for the regions under consideration, where we focus on the north Indian Ocean and the tropical north Atlantic Ocean. We compare the spatial features of various topological properties of the network, and the spatial scales involved, in the absence and presence of a cyclone. We find that network measures such as degree and clustering exhibit significant signatures of TCs and have striking similarities with their tracks. The study of network topology over time scales relevant to TCs allows us to obtain useful insights into the individual local signature of changes in the flow structure of the regional climate system.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shraddha Gupta ◽  
Niklas Boers ◽  
Florian Pappenberger ◽  
Jürgen Kurths

AbstractTropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the most destructive natural hazards that pose a serious threat to society, particularly to those in the coastal regions. In this work, we study the temporal evolution of the regional weather conditions in relation to the occurrence of TCs using climate networks. Climate networks encode the interactions among climate variables at different locations on the Earth’s surface, and in particular, time-evolving climate networks have been successfully applied to study different climate phenomena at comparably long time scales, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, different monsoon systems, or the climatic impacts of volcanic eruptions. Here, we develop and apply a complex network approach suitable for the investigation of the relatively short-lived TCs. We show that our proposed methodology has the potential to identify TCs and their tracks from mean sea level pressure (MSLP) data. We use the ERA5 reanalysis MSLP data to construct successive networks of overlapping, short-length time windows for the regions under consideration, where we focus on the north Indian Ocean and the tropical north Atlantic Ocean. We compare the spatial features of various topological properties of the network, and the spatial scales involved, in the absence and presence of a cyclone. We find that network measures such as degree and clustering exhibit significant signatures of TCs and have striking similarities with their tracks. The study of the network topology over time scales relevant to TCs allows us to obtain crucial insights into the effects of TCs on the spatial connectivity structure of sea-level pressure fields.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shraddha Gupta ◽  
Jürgen Kurths ◽  
Florian Pappenberger

<p>Every point on the Earth’s surface is a dynamical system which behaves in a complex way while interacting with other dynamical systems. Network theory captures this feature of climate to study the collective behaviour of these interacting systems giving new insights into the problem. Recently, climate networks have been a promising approach to the study of climate phenomena such as El Niño, Indian monsoon, etc. These phenomena, however, occur over a long period of time. Weather phenomena such as tropical cyclones (TCs) that are relatively short-lived, destructive events are a major concern to life and property especially for densely populated coastlines such as in the North Indian Ocean (NIO) basin. Here, we study TCs in the NIO basin by constructing climate networks using the ERA5 Sea Surface Temperature and Air temperature at 1000 hPa. We analyze these networks using the percolation framework for the post-monsoon (October-November-December) season which experiences a high frequency of TCs every year. We find significant signatures of TCs in the network structure which appear as abrupt discontinuities in the percolation-based parameters during the period of a TC. This shows the potential of climate networks towards forecasting of tropical cyclones.</p><p> </p><p>This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813844.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 1695-1709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Munehiko Yamaguchi ◽  
Frédéric Vitart ◽  
Simon T. K. Lang ◽  
Linus Magnusson ◽  
Russell L. Elsberry ◽  
...  

Abstract Operational global medium-range ensemble forecasts of tropical cyclone (TC) activity (genesis plus the subsequent track) are systematically evaluated to understand the skill of the state-of-the-art ensembles in forecasting TC activity as well as the relative benefits of a multicenter grand ensemble with respect to a single-model ensemble. The global ECMWF, JMA, NCEP, and UKMO ensembles are evaluated from 2010 to 2013 in seven TC basins around the world. The verification metric is the Brier skill score (BSS), which is calculated within a 3-day time window over a forecast length of 2 weeks to examine the skill from short- to medium-range time scales (0–14 days). These operational global medium-range ensembles are capable of providing guidance on TC activity forecasts that extends into week 2. Multicenter grand ensembles (MCGEs) tend to have better forecast skill (larger BSSs) than does the best single-model ensemble, which is the ECMWF ensemble in most verification time windows and most TC basins. The relative benefit of the MCGEs is relatively large in the north Indian Ocean and TC basins in the Southern Hemisphere where the BSS of the single-model ensemble is relatively small. The BSS metric and the reliability are found to be sensitive to the choice of threshold wind values that are used to define the model TCs.


Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 363
Author(s):  
George Duffy ◽  
Fraser King ◽  
Ralf Bennartz ◽  
Christopher G. Fletcher

CloudSat is often the only measurement of snowfall rate available at high latitudes, making it a valuable tool for understanding snow climatology. The capability of CloudSat to provide information on seasonal and subseasonal time scales, however, has yet to be explored. In this study, we use subsampled reanalysis estimates to predict the uncertainties of CloudSat snow water equivalent (SWE) accumulation measurements at various space and time resolutions. An idealized/simulated subsampling model predicts that CloudSat may provide seasonal SWE estimates with median percent errors below 50% at spatial scales as small as 2° × 2°. By converting these predictions to percent differences, we can evaluate CloudSat snowfall accumulations against a blend of gridded SWE measurements during frozen time periods. Our predictions are in good agreement with results. The 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of the percent differences between the two measurements all match predicted values within eight percentage points. We interpret these results to suggest that CloudSat snowfall estimates are in sufficient agreement with other, thoroughly vetted, gridded SWE products. This implies that CloudSat may provide useful estimates of snow accumulation over remote regions within seasonal time scales.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1063293X2110031
Author(s):  
Maolin Yang ◽  
Auwal H Abubakar ◽  
Pingyu Jiang

Social manufacturing is characterized by its capability of utilizing socialized manufacturing resources to achieve value adding. Recently, a new type of social manufacturing pattern emerges and shows potential for core factories to improve their limited manufacturing capabilities by utilizing the resources from outside socialized manufacturing resource communities. However, the core factories need to analyze the resource characteristics of the socialized resource communities before making operation plans, and this is challenging due to the unaffiliated and self-driven characteristics of the resource providers in socialized resource communities. In this paper, a deep learning and complex network based approach is established to address this challenge by using socialized designer community for demonstration. Firstly, convolutional neural network models are trained to identify the design resource characteristics of each socialized designer in designer community according to the interaction texts posted by the socialized designer on internet platforms. During the process, an iterative dataset labelling method is established to reduce the time cost for training set labelling. Secondly, complex networks are used to model the design resource characteristics of the community according to the resource characteristics of all the socialized designers in the community. Two real communities from RepRap 3D printer project are used as case study.


Author(s):  
Shuang Song ◽  
Dawei Xu ◽  
Shanshan Hu ◽  
Mengxi Shi

Habitat destruction and declining ecosystem service levels caused by urban expansion have led to increased ecological risks in cities, and ecological network optimization has become the main way to resolve this contradiction. Here, we used landscape patterns, meteorological and hydrological data as data sources, applied the complex network theory, landscape ecology, and spatial analysis technology, a quantitative analysis of the current state of landscape pattern characteristics in the central district of Harbin was conducted. The minimum cumulative resistance was used to extract the ecological network of the study area. Optimized the ecological network by edge-adding of the complex network theory, compared the optimizing effects of different edge-adding strategies by using robustness analysis, and put forward an effective way to optimize the ecological network of the study area. The results demonstrate that: The ecological patches of Daowai, Xiangfang, Nangang, and other old districts in the study area are small in size, fewer in number, strongly fragmented, with a single external morphology, and high internal porosity. While the ecological patches in the new districts of Songbei, Hulan, and Acheng have a relatively good foundation. And ecological network connectivity in the study area is generally poor, the ecological corridors are relatively sparse and scattered, the connections between various ecological sources of the corridors are not close. Comparing different edge-adding strategies of complex network theory, the low-degree-first strategy has the most outstanding performance in the robustness test. The low-degree-first strategy was used to optimize the ecological network of the study area, 43 ecological corridors are added. After the optimization, the large and the small ecological corridors are evenly distributed to form a complete network, the optimized ecological network will be significantly more connected, resilient, and resistant to interference, the ecological flow transmission will be more efficient.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Bedinger ◽  
Lindsay Beevers ◽  
Lila Collet ◽  
Annie Visser

Climate change is a product of the Anthropocene, and the human–nature system in which we live. Effective climate change adaptation requires that we acknowledge this complexity. Theoretical literature on sustainability transitions has highlighted this and called for deeper acknowledgment of systems complexity in our research practices. Are we heeding these calls for ‘systems’ research? We used hydrohazards (floods and droughts) as an example research area to explore this question. We first distilled existing challenges for complex human–nature systems into six central concepts: Uncertainty, multiple spatial scales, multiple time scales, multimethod approaches, human–nature dimensions, and interactions. We then performed a systematic assessment of 737 articles to examine patterns in what methods are used and how these cover the complexity concepts. In general, results showed that many papers do not reference any of the complexity concepts, and no existing approach addresses all six. We used the detailed results to guide advancement from theoretical calls for action to specific next steps. Future research priorities include the development of methods for consideration of multiple hazards; for the study of interactions, particularly in linking the short- to medium-term time scales; to reduce data-intensivity; and to better integrate bottom–up and top–down approaches in a way that connects local context with higher-level decision-making. Overall this paper serves to build a shared conceptualisation of human–nature system complexity, map current practice, and navigate a complexity-smart trajectory for future research.


Author(s):  
Jia-Rong Yeh ◽  
Chung-Kang Peng ◽  
Norden E. Huang

Multi-scale entropy (MSE) was developed as a measure of complexity for complex time series, and it has been applied widely in recent years. The MSE algorithm is based on the assumption that biological systems possess the ability to adapt and function in an ever-changing environment, and these systems need to operate across multiple temporal and spatial scales, such that their complexity is also multi-scale and hierarchical. Here, we present a systematic approach to apply the empirical mode decomposition algorithm, which can detrend time series on various time scales, prior to analysing a signal’s complexity by measuring the irregularity of its dynamics on multiple time scales. Simulated time series of fractal Gaussian noise and human heartbeat time series were used to study the performance of this new approach. We show that our method can successfully quantify the fractal properties of the simulated time series and can accurately distinguish modulations in human heartbeat time series in health and disease.


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