Quantitative assessment of drivers of recent climate variability: An information theoretic approach

TL;DR

This study uses an information theoretic approach to quantify the influence of various natural and anthropogenic factors on recent climate variability, identifying key drivers like greenhouse gases and volcanic aerosols.

Contribution

It introduces a non-parametric transfer entropy method to distinguish and quantify the directional influence of climate drivers without bias from their shared history.

Findings

CO2, CH4, and volcanic aerosols are primary climate drivers.

UV radiation and ENSO are secondary influences.

ENSO and GMTA mutually influence each other at different time lags.

Abstract

Identification and quantification of possible drivers of recent climate variability remain a challenging task. This important issue is addressed adopting a non-parametric information theory technique, the Transfer Entropy and its normalized variant. It distinctly quantifies actual information exchanged along with the directional flow of information between any two variables with no bearing on their common history or inputs, unlike correlation, mutual information etc. Measurements of greenhouse gases, CO2, CH4, and N2O; volcanic aerosols; solar activity: UV radiation, total solar irradiance (TSI ) and cosmic ray flux (CR); El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Global Mean Temperature Anomaly (GMTA) made during 1984-2005 are utilized to distinguish driving and responding climate signals. Estimates of their relative contributions reveal that CO 2 (~24%), CH 4 (~19%) and volcanic aerosols (~23%) are the primary contributors to the observed variations in GMTA. While, UV (~9%) and ENSO (~12%) act as secondary drivers of variations in the GMTA, the remaining play a marginal role in the observed recent climate variability. Interestingly, ENSO and GMTA mutually drive each other at varied time lags. This study assists future modelling efforts in climate science.