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Can kurtosis be an early warning signal for abrupt climate change?

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Abstract

The climate system occasionally experiences an abrupt change. However, it is very difficult to predict this change at present. Fortunately, some generic properties have been revealed before several different types of dynamical system near their own critical thresholds. These properties provide a possible way to give an early warning for an impending abrupt climate change. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the applicability of an early warning indicator of an abrupt change. On the basis of several simple fold models, we have systematically investigated the performance of the kurtosis coefficient as an early warning signal for an upcoming abrupt climate change. The testing results indicate that the kurtosis coefficient is a reliable warning indicator in most of cases whether a critical control parameter or the strength of an external forcing approaches a critical point. However, the strong noise can greatly shorten the effective warning time, and also can result in the reduction of the magnitude of a kurtosis coefficient when a dynamical system approaches its critical threshold. The missing data has almost no effect on the kurtosis coefficient in all of tests, even it is true when the missing data accounts for 20% of the total sample. We also found that the kurtosis coefficient does not work in some cases, which means that the kurtosis coefficient is not a universal early warning signal for an upcoming abrupt change.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and editors for the beneficial and helpful suggestions for this manuscript. This research was jointly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 41775092, 41605069, 41475073, 41530531, and 41475064).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Institute of Space Weather, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Xiao-qiang Xie, Bin Gu & Ying Mei

  2. National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xiao-qiang Xie, Wen-ping He, Bin Gu, Ying Mei & Shan-shan Zhao

  3. Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters, Nanjing University of Information Sciences and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Xiao-qiang Xie, Wen-ping He, Ying Mei & Shan-shan Zhao

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  1. Xiao-qiang Xie
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Xie, Xq., He, Wp., Gu, B. et al. Can kurtosis be an early warning signal for abrupt climate change?. Clim Dyn 52, 6863–6876 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4549-9

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