Detecting climate teleconnections with Granger causality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach using Granger causality to detect climate teleconnections, improving upon correlation methods by inferring directional relationships across climate fields at multiple timescales.

Contribution

The study presents a new method leveraging Granger causality for identifying climate teleconnections, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness compared to traditional correlation-based approaches.

Findings

Both methods recover known seasonal responses to ENSO.

Granger causality identifies additional potential teleconnections.

Results are consistent across different temporal resolutions.

Abstract

Climate system teleconnections are crucial for improving climate predictability, but difficult to quantify. Standard approaches to identify teleconnections are often based on correlations between time series. Here we present a novel method leveraging Granger causality, which can infer/detect relationships between any two fields. We compare teleconnections identified by correlation and Granger causality at different timescales. We find that both Granger causality and correlation consistently recover known seasonal precipitation responses to the sea surface temperature pattern associated with the El Ni\~{n}o Southern Oscillation. Such findings are robust across multiple time resolutions. In addition, we identify candidates for unexplored teleconnection responses.