Influence of autocorrelation on the topology of the climate network

TL;DR

This paper investigates how autocorrelation in climate data influences the topology of climate networks, revealing that autocorrelation can cause spurious links and affect network structure.

Contribution

It demonstrates that autocorrelation significantly impacts climate network topology and explains discrepancies caused by different link definitions.

Findings

Autocorrelation introduces spurious links in climate networks.

Different link definitions lead to varying network topologies.

Autocorrelation effects can be distinguished using detrended fluctuation analysis.

Abstract

Different definitions of links in climate networks may lead to considerably different network topologies. We construct a network from climate records of surface level atmospheric temperature in different geographical sites around the globe using two commonly used definitions of links. Utilizing detrended fluctuation analysis, shuffled surrogates and separation analysis of maritime and continental records, we find that one of the major influences on the structure of climate networks is due to the auto-correlation in the records, that may introduce spurious links. This may explain why different methods could lead to different climate network topologies.