Early warning signal for interior crises in excitable systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new early warning signal based on critical attractor growth that predicts interior crises in excitable systems, extending the ability to forecast complex global bifurcations.

Contribution

It presents a novel scaling behavior indicator for predicting interior crises, applicable to chaotic and strange-nonchaotic attractors in dynamical systems.

Findings

Critical attractor growth precedes interior crises in models.

The warning signal works in climate and neuronal models.

Extends early warning methods to global bifurcations.

Abstract

The ability to reliably predict critical transitions in dynamical systems is a long-standing goal of diverse scientific communities. Previous work focused on early warning signals related to local bifurcations (critical slowing down) and non-bifurcation type transitions. We extend this toolbox and report on a characteristic scaling behavior (critical attractor growth) which is indicative of an impending global bifurcation, an interior crisis in excitable systems. We demonstrate our early warning signal in a conceptual climate model as well as in a model of coupled neurons known to exhibit extreme events. We observed critical attractor growth prior to interior crises of chaotic as well as strange-nonchaotic attractors. These observations promise to extend the classes of transitions that can be predicted via early warning signals.