Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-2016-47
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-2016-47
25 Oct 2016
 | 25 Oct 2016
Status: this discussion paper is a preprint. It has been under review for the journal Earth System Dynamics (ESD). The manuscript was not accepted for further review after discussion.

Identifying global patterns of stochasticity and nonlinearity in the Earth System

Fernando Arizmendi, Marcelo Barreiro, and Cristina Masoller

Abstract. We demonstrate that two simple measures of time series analysis are able to capture different dynamical and statistical properties of large-scale atmospheric phenomena. We consider two surface air temperature (SAT) datasets, covering a spatial grid of points over the Earth surface (NCEP CDAS1 and ERA Interim reanalysis). In each location we analyze i) the distance between the lagged SAT time series and the insolation (i.e., the local top-of-atmosphere incoming solar radiation), and ii) the Shannon entropy computed from the probability distribution function (pdf) of SAT values. The distance quantifies the similarity between the lagged SAT waveform and the isolation waveform, while the entropy, as defined in information theory, measures the degree of disorder or uncertainty of each time series, which we refer to as stochasticity: the entropy captures the shape of the SAT pdf and is maximum when the pdf is uniform. With the distance measure we uncover well-defined spatial patterns formed by regions with similar SAT response to solar forcing, while with the entropy measure, we uncover regions that have SAT pdf of similar shape. The entropy analysis also allows identifying the geographical regions in which SAT time series has extreme values (i.e., values which are extreme in the local statistics), because the long-tail shape of the pdf is captured as low entropy values. We uncover significant differences between the NCEP CDAS1 and ERA Interim datasets in specific geographical regions, which are due to the presence of extreme values in one dataset but not in the other. In this way, the entropy maps are a valuable tool for anomaly detection and model inter-comparisons.

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Fernando Arizmendi, Marcelo Barreiro, and Cristina Masoller
 
Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
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Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
Printer-friendly Version - Printer-friendly version Supplement - Supplement
Fernando Arizmendi, Marcelo Barreiro, and Cristina Masoller
Fernando Arizmendi, Marcelo Barreiro, and Cristina Masoller

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Short summary
We analyze the dynamical and statistical properties of two surface air temperature (SAT) reanalysis datasets. For each SAT time-series we analyze i) the distance between the lagged SAT time series and the insolation, and ii) the Shannon entropy computed from the probability distribution function (pdf) of SAT values. We show that these simple measures uncover meaningful long-range coherent spatial structures that emerge from the local properties of SAT time-series.
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