Climate Network Structure Follows North Atlantic Oscillation Phases

TL;DR

This study constructs climate networks from North Atlantic data, revealing that network link strengths vary significantly with NAO phases, offering a new way to monitor oscillation patterns.

Contribution

It demonstrates that climate network structures are highly sensitive to NAO phases, providing a novel network-based measure for tracking oscillation patterns.

Findings

Network link strength varies with NAO phases.

Number of strong links increases during positive NAO.

Network sensitivity exceeds spatial average response.

Abstract

We construct a network from climate records of different geographical sites in the North Atlantic. A link between two sites represents the cross-correlations between the records of each site. We find that within the different phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) the correlation values of the links are significantly different. By setting an optimize threshold on the correlation values, we find that the number of strong links in the network is increased during times of positive NAO indices, and decreased during times of negative NAO indices. We find a pronounced sensitivity of the network structure to the oscillations which is significantly higher compared to the observed response of spatial average of the records. Our result suggests a new measure that tracks the NAO pattern.